Clerk Computer Extremely Slow, can't even type.

[seperry]

Hi All, Our Lenovo Thinkcentre M700 is running extremely slow. When we type we have to hit a key....wait 5 to 10 seconds hit another key...and so on. Our FM Group representative said this is happening in other places and it must be a programming issue, not a hardware issue.

We're running Windows 10 Pro.

Anyone else seeing this?

Steven E. Perry
1st Councilor in the Branch Presidency
Vernonia Branch
Forest Grove Oregon Stake

[russellhltn]

It's probably busy doing updates and stuff. It can be very slow the first half hour after booting. Especially if it's been off a long time, making for multiple updates.

There's also a possibility it's uninstalling Sophos as the church is moving away from that. Ultimately, that's a good thing since I think it's behind much of the performance issues. However, when I tried to uninstall it manually, it took about 2 hours to go though all the steps.

I'd leave them on for a couple of weeks (assuming they won't overheat in a closed room without A/C) to work though their issues. Visit them parodically to make sure they're not waiting for permission to reboot.

[Biggles]

Turned on the two clerk computers in our stake centre Wednesday, for the first time in two months. Both within 30 minutes had dispensed with Sophos, without me having to raise a finger. Yippee no more Sophos!

[seperry]

It's funny you mentioned Sophos. When I was looking into this, The IBM Big Fix had an issue and it still had Sophos installed. I eventually got the IBM Big Fix to run and uninstall Sophos. After rebooting a few times, I left it on to do any various updates. I'll check it again in the AM and see if it's any better!

[seperry]

Here's the story,

It took about 2 days of updating, rebooting and slapping around our Clerk Computer, Webcasting Laptop and the 3 FHC computers, but they are finally rid of Sophos, Updated to Windows 10 version 20H2. All of the Windows 10 Updates did not just automatically happen. I had to not only click on Windows updates, but Big Fix and accept updates, click on the sentence in Blue stating Microsoft Updates available and our ISP service is only 15 meg...

So there you go. Their working like a dream.

I'm glad someone else can just turn them on after 2 months and "Poof" magic happens, not so lucky in this small town branch.

Steve

[russellhltn]

but Big Fix and accept updates

Is that for the FHC machines? I couldn't find any such thing for the clerk computers.

I've been leaving the clerk computers on and setting the Power settings in control panel to never go to sleep (at least until the updates complete).

That seems to do the trick in getting rid of Sophos. The manual process is slow and doesn't do a good job.

[seperry]

Hi russellhltn, The FHC computers needed to have a massive amounts of updates done too. I talked the missionaries into sitting in the FHC and keep running updates and rebooting until they were all done. It took about half a day....but we only have 12mb/sec service in our little branch. steve

[Mikerowaved]

I saw this on my ward's PC a few weeks back. It was basically choking on updates. The poor mechanical hard drive was pegged at 100% usage for many hours. The best I could guess was with only 4GB of RAM, and some of that being used for video, the machine was caught in a "paging" frenzy where the swap file was being heavily utilized due to an over-commitment of available RAM. Decades ago, this same thing used to bring the IBM mainframe I worked on to it's knees. It was called "thrashing" as you could hear the big R/W heads on those washing machine-sized hard drives frantically jump from track-to-track trying to keep up with the demand, but falling ever behind.

If you let it churn, it should eventually work itself out of the jam - until next time. The ultimate solution is give it another 4GB RAM stick and change out the HD for an SSD. I know, these aren't our PC's to be tinkering with, but for about $40 each, you could actually make them last a lot longer than 5 years.

[exxodus]

The IT group decided to send out Computers with hard drives instead of a cost effective SSD. I have found that Windows 10, during upgrades will peg a hard drive to the point the computer becomes unusable. Add in the Sophos solution and you will get the experience of the Mikerowaved got. I have been upgrading family and friends laptops over the past year because of it. We have been switching out the Hard drive with a $50 SSD to fix the issue in our Stake. Why they picked a Western Digital 500GB Black hard drive over a 256GB SSD seems odd to me. The clerks computer doesn't need 500GB and they spent extra money on WD's more expensive Black version which is in the cost range of a 256GB SSD. I use a $30 2 bay USB disk solution with a cloning function. Easy to use and you don't have to play around with the hidden partitions. You do have to match the drive size or get a drive that is larger though.

[Biggles]

Ignore this, my comments were addressed elsewhere.