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I'm looking both for some general advice, and any specific hints for my situation. (so please don't close as too localized, even the general advice is helpful)

General question:

I have a laptop, belonging to my employer, running Windows 7 64-bit. If I put it in sleep mode, walk to a meeting room, and immediately startup from sleep it's fairly quick. But if it has been a few hours, it takes a long time (anywhere from 3-5 minutes) to resume from sleep. Also there are times when I'm in the middle of working, and things just seem to hang and take 10-15 seconds before they continue.

The problem isn't with the CPU being too slow: it rarely maxes out.

Could you comment on which of the following approaches might be likely to help improve my situation, or how to figure out what is causing the slowness?

  • Adding more memory
  • Investigating if I can add a SSD as a 2nd hard drive, and put the swapfile/pagefile on it
  • "Performance tuneup" (drive defrag / Registry cleanup / etc.) either by my company's Information Services group, or trying to do it myself with performance-tuning software
  • Something else

(I'm not a computer expert; I have a limited time and budget; and although we have an internal Information Services office which can help with computer issues, it is a big productivity hit when I leave my laptop with them to solve problems, and sometimes they can help and sometimes not.)

Specifics:

  • Lenovo W520 laptop
  • 8GB at present (looks like it takes 16GB maximum)
  • Typical software use -- I tend to run several (4-10) large applications at once:
    • Eclipse
    • Chrome or Firefox web browsers with 10-15 tabs open
    • Acrobat Reader with 3-5 documents open
    • MS Word and/or Excel
    • Outlook
    • (etc.)
  • Major known background programs running:
    • Virus scan = Symantec Endpoint Protection
    • TortoiseX source control (TortoiseSVN and TortoiseHg)
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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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You saying that if you close your laptop and open it again in about 15 mins it is quick, but after several hours it is slow. I think when you close the laptop it goes to Sleep and after 15 mins(depends on settings) it goes to Hibernate. If it is in Sleep it boots very quick, if it is Hibernate then it takes time. Even if it goes to Hibernate it shouldn't take that long. See how many processes are running.

Go to ControlPanel > PowerOptions to see the settings.

Also see FAQs on Sleep and Hibernate

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  • Huh. It was set to go from Sleep -> Hibernate after 360 minutes. I've set it to Never, hopefully that should at least fix part of the problem. Thanks!
    – Jason S
    Apr 25, 2013 at 20:31
  • @JasonS Well it never goes to Hibernate but this is not good too. Because if you just close your laptop and it stays in sleep for a so mane hours then battery dies. It is equal to unplugging the desktop from power outlet. So you don't want that either. Set go to hibernate after 24 hours or closes option. Then your computer works fine.
    – Dilshod
    Apr 25, 2013 at 21:47
  • when your working and it Balks for 10-20 seconds, that can occur because the hard drive "went to sleep" (spun-down) nothing really wrong with that as long as you know what and why. a SDD does not have to spin back up.
    – Psycogeek
    Apr 26, 2013 at 13:19
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Consult your IT department. Often times there are policies regarding employees tampering with company resources.

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  • A good tangential comment, but not a great answer. I'm not talking about altering the hardware myself, but I do need to know what requests to make of the IT dept.
    – Jason S
    Apr 25, 2013 at 19:36
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    This really should be a comment, not an answer.
    – Karan
    Apr 25, 2013 at 20:36
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I too had similar problem in my desktop. It takes a longer time to wake up. I didn't know how it solved the problem but the problem was solved. I added additional RAM (4GB) to my PC which initially had a 2 GB RAM.Also try using another brand of RAM .Initially I had 2GB apacer DDR2 RAM and I replaced it with 4 GB Transcend RAM (both 800MHz).It worked fine.

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