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m15 R1, disk always 100%, impossibly slow
Hi......again,
So it’s now been 6 months or so since I got a Alienware m15 R1 and it’s still been painfully slow. I have been on the phone with the Alienware tech tram who have run diagnostics on 2 separate occasions. Performance is still really slow in places, even with just chrome running it takes 30 seconds to open up and run. The only suggestion I’ve been given is to get an SSD hard drive in addition to the Mechanical Hard Drive I have now.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
JOcean
7 Technologist
7 Technologist
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12K Posts
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November 11th, 2019 19:00
And SSD would help as the performance is about 5x faster than an HDD. Still I am thinking you have an i7 8th or 9th generation and at least 8 GB of RAM. Seeing as this is an Alienware system, it should be very fast. Have you ran an antivirus to make sure your system is clean. And while you are at it download and run Malwarebytes free. Then scan the system with that. You stated that diagnostics have been run twice with no problems detected. Just to be sure restart the system and at the Dell splash screen select and run full diagnostics. Watch for any RAM or hard driver errors. Aside from being on the Internet, how is the performance otherwise?
https://www.malwarebytes.com/
AdrianG001
4 Operator
4 Operator
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4K Posts
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November 12th, 2019 04:00
Space:
Do you mean the disk space is used 100%? if so the short of it is to delete unneeded stuff off the drive. Otherwise replace the drive with a larger one. You should NEVER let the used space go over 90%, it’s a sure way to make your computer as slow as it can get. Actually for best performance don’t let it grow beyond 70% (50% is probably a good time to start worrying). If there are things you’d like to keep, but not necessarily work on right now move them to something like an external or second drive.
Performance:
Is the drive being used at 100% of its possible speed? I.e. something like the task manager shows that resource usage is 100% on the drive? This tends to mean some background process is working on the drive. Probably something like an anti-virus scanning all the files on the drive - set it to do so at times when you’re not using your computer, or turn this auto-scan feature off and run it manually when you’ve got the time. Similar background processes like auto-defrag could also cause this, and same applies to them, either change the settings or turn them off. It could also mean you’ve got too little RAM and what you’re seeing is the memory manager constantly swapping from RAM to disk and back, if so install more RAM you don’t have enough for the programs you’re running.
If there’s no background process (at least not one you can see) and your RAM isn’t used fully, then there’s likely a virus. It could be that the drive is simply too slow for the tasks you’re putting it to (install something faster like a SSD), but that’s rather unusual.
Both:
In both cases above, uninstall programs (and especially background programs) you don’t really need. Be quite forceful in this. If you have to think about something for longer than a few seconds, you probably don’t need it. Get rid of it, it’s just taking up space and/or using your drive for no benefit to you or try DaaS windows.
Regards,
Adrian