i7 -2630m, 6GB RAM, 750GB 7200 rpm, nvidia 555m - Supposed to be slow?

Question

I've purchased an Alienware m14x laptop for $1,400.

It's slow. Quite slow actually. My other laptop that has a celeron is going faster than this and it's xp and this is windows 7 home. I'm not sure if it's just me or the laptop? There isn't a load of programs at boot, but there are some and they are small programs. I closed some of them off using msconfig but it's still quite slow. By quite slow I mean, it takes quite a bit of time to log on, or if one user is logged on and nothing is happening within that user, and I switch to another one, its very slow and laggy. It's hard to even browse or stream movies.

For instance, when I first got it out of the box it was fast, I could blast deus ex almost at cap highest performance. Now I have notch the entire game down to a medium due to lag or frame skipping. I have had an error where I would be playing the game and my graphics card failed and it shut off. It only happened once but it was quite frustrating.

Day 3 of the laptop and I have a line of dead pixels on the right side and I called technical support and they will be replacing my screen.

So my concern is, should I call the company and notify them that this laptop is not preforming to the standers it should be? or am I mistaken and this is how it's supposed to be?

Answer 1

The lag could also be due to heat. Unlikely, but possible as graphics cards and processors these days downclock themselves to prevent overheating at certain temperatures. Tools like GPUZ and CPUZ will help you determine if they are downclocking due to heat.

Outside of that, without more information, we don't know what is "slow" and what should be "fast."

Your best bet is to post numbers. Fire up Performance Monitor and Open up the Data Collector Sets. Open the System node and select the default System Performance data set. Rightclick it (the cube) on the left hand side and select start.

This data set is configured to run indefinitely and collect a lot of useful data. It will sample every one second and records basically every counter under CPU, DISK, MEMORY, network card, and processes. Run it for a couple of hours and upload it. Don't sleep your computer because it is not set to autostart.

edit

BTW, to get to the reports, just look for the node reports in Perfmon. They are stored under C:\perflogs.

Answer 2

Based on your machine's symptoms, specifically slow login/user switch times, I think you're experiencing some bloat. Specifically, I would think the whatever you're starting at boot/login is consuming more resources than you think or is immediately apparent. Look closely at task manager & system resource monitor for things consumer large amounts of RAM, CPU time, or swap space.

If nothing appears as the culprit, shut off everything set to load at login, and check your performance again. If nothing seems to help, a clean install might be the solution as @Billy ONeal suggested in the comments. New laptops can come with preinstalled software that can be a drain on system resources. I don't know if Alienware does this, but a clean install can't hurt (so long as you back up your personal files).

Answer 3

There may be a number of reasons for this:

1. The Windows install is bad. This is not an uncommon problem with OEM PCs where the OS is imaged in instead of installed. I didn't think Alienware did this but given that they're owned by Dell, who knows. Reinstalling Windows may fix this.

2. One or more components may be bad. Non-fatal hardware errors can manifest themselves as slow response times.

Here are some tools to check for hardware errors:

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Intel Burn-In Test

^{Note: download link is at the bottom. Beware the fake "download" advertisement.}

Basically, this tool will run a stress test on your system and generate a number. It will repeat the test and if there are any hardware problems, the number will change test to test and the tool will warn you of said problems.

Tracking down the specific component that is failing is more difficult, but once you discover that something is failing, then it should be Alienware's responsibility to further diagnose and fix it.

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HWMonitor

During the stress test, also run HWMonitor. It will show you the temperatures of the various components that report their temperatures. Don't be alarmed if some of them are pretty high (> 60°C) as this is normal with laptops, but anything higher than 80°C (CPU) and 90°C (GPU) should be concerning.

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SpeedFan

In addition to also providing temperature measurements, this tool can read the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard drive. If you're experiencing bad performance as the result of a bad HDD, then this tool will help you find it.

It will not only read the SMART status of the drive, but is also capable of benchmarking it.

Answer 4

I would use the Windows Performance Monitor to see what is adding load to the systems. I hope this is helpful.

Answer 5

6GB of ram? There aren't 3 ram slots in the Alienware Laptops. Might be an idea to upgrade to 2x 4gb. I have an M17x and when I bought it, they offered 4gb and get 2gb free, but they're not matched, so this might the reason for your performance issues.