Hello from the UK!
I have to tell you all that I think there may be an inherent fault with this machine on the motherboard's SATA hardware - judging from my own experience of trying to setup up two of them within the space of a week.
I fix PC problems for a living - check out my (non-state-of-the-art) web site www.bobcrabtree.co.uk (and no, I'm not looking for business in the USA!).
On my advice (me bad), a customer purchased a 17in IdeaPad 320 (i5/1TB HDD/8GB RAM) and brought it to me to setup.
The quick bottom line is that the hard disk speed was unbelievably slow and erratic when tested with the program I typically use - ATTO Benchmark.
So, I'd be keen for people to post here screengrabs of their own hard disk speed test using that app.
But, to make things fair, do please try to get rid of temporary files and optimise the hard disk before (and after) running the app.
The perceived hard disk speed echoed that performance - the initial updating of Win10 was slow; the process took three times longer (possibly four or five) than I'd expected (my broadband speed is 220Mbps!); program installs were slow; everything was slow.
Yet the hard disk itself, I believe, was not faulty (having tested it repeatedly with CrystalDiskInfo - in situ, admittedly).
I tried a few little tweaks but, in the end, the first machine became locked up - it was permanently stuck with a screen saying, Preparing Automatic Repair.
Nothing I could do got me out of that repair screen - so the laptop was returned for a replacement.
Well, I started work on that replacement early this morning and it is showing the same slow performance issues as the first one and I have no intention of putting all the many hours I put in on the first one (MS Office installed; Adobe Reader DC installed; lots of other good stuff installed).
So the second one is going back, too, and - after reading this thread - I'll be advising the client to get a different model or a refund if there isn't a suitable alternative available from the reseller.
I didn't have any simple way of getting the speed-tests grabs out of the first IdeaPad 320 because it was locked solid but I did create one today at an early stage and have attached it here. I'd not done anything to try to get the disk running at full speed, and, under normal circumstances, I'd not make public the results of a test on an un-optimised disk.
However, I'm losing the will to live waiting for the running Windows update to finish, so I'm making an exception.
But what I will try to do is post a second screengrab once I can get back to the desktop and have carried out some optimisations.
