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February 18th, 2021 18:00
M14x R2, Win10 refresh - bonkers speed
Hi all - I've got a venerable M14x R2 still kicking around. The RAID setup borked out a few months back, so I wiped it and put Win10 on it, and gave it to my son. Windows Update borked the laptop during a recent update (I think the major upgrade that went down last month), so I reinstalled Windows, and this thing is still a bat outta h*ll fast. It boots in 20 sec. It loads app waaaay faster than any magnetic drive-based laptop we have around the house. It's got the old 32 GB SSD cache drive in it, and the old Intel RST BIOS doing the caching. I'm a little surprised - I can hardly believe that this really old tech is still caching things so well. There's nothing in Win10 that's helping out with this process is there? I wasn't able to find any Intel apps or components that seem to assist the caching process.
Am I correct in believing that the old BIOS is still keeping this thing a hot rod? Thanks in advance.
mattyb3
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February 18th, 2021 20:00
Good to hear there are others out there like me who still keep these old laptops alive.
That is pretty quick for a cache. Do you have UEFI and fast boot set up in the BIOS or are you still running on Legacy? The only thing that runs the cache should be the Intel RST which is a system driver and there is also a user interface program as well.
_wesmac
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February 18th, 2021 22:00
Hey Matt - it was on legacy boot, but switching to UEFI didn't seem to make any difference. It does seem as if the Intel RST driver via BIOS is doing all the legwork on the M14x. I never could find a compatible version of Intel RST GUI that would run under Win10, but it seems I don't need it - Win7 had it of course, though I don't know if it was required for caching to work in Win7.
I have a newer Lenovo Legion which uses Optane Memory which is handled entirely by the Intel Optane Memory app under Win10; so no old-school BIOS apps there.
It is super cool to have an old laptop still kicking butt after 7+ years of long days of service. I've had to replace the keyboard on it after a few keys wore out (not WASD as it was being used for CAD and business work, not gaming). I was impressed that Win10 works so flawlessly with legacy hardware in the thing. In a world that seems happy to create e-waste, it's nice to not contribute to the problem, and still have gear that cooks along with impressive speed even by today's standards! UserBenchmark reported 74th percentile for CPU, 64th percentile for 650M graphics (which are still underpowered) and similar for the RAM. I wonder how many more years this thing could run?
You've got a lot of horses in your stable
crimsom
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6.1K Posts
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February 18th, 2021 23:00
Hi @_wesmac the HDD used the external caching to increase performance. If you have put a SSD in the 2.5" bay, it does not use the external caching, but you could get Windows 10 to use it as virtual RAM.