Mind numbingly slow computer

[davea0511]

3-5 yr old IBM thinkstation. 3 minutes to boot up. Minutes to go to website. Struggles with simple tasks like printing. What are my options here?

[russellhltn]

Look at the tag. It should have a date that indicates when it was built. Generally computers are replaced after 5 years, but the STS should be working with FM so it can be budgeted.

I'd work with the STS on having the computer checked out.

[davea0511]

Thanks, I'll do that!

[dave.swartz]

Also please post exactly what model of computer you have. For our stake we have had two different batches of computers (currently in active use). The M720Q (red stripe on front with a single USB type c port on front) are nice machines with an i5 processor. It is capable of being upgraded to Windows 11. A later batch we received from FM are an all black computer with a Celeron processor, that I feel is slower than the older computer. Newer isn't always better. These are all Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny computers. The older small desktop computers from Lenovo have all been surpluses in our stake and sent back to SLC.

While old we are in no hurry to replace any of our stakes computers. These may be the last set we have in our stake.

Out of curiosity for the STS in this forum what kind of computer are they shipping currently?

[russellhltn]

Out of curiosity for the STS in this forum what kind of computer are they shipping currently?

The most recent ones were a year ago. They were Lenovo M70q.

[dave.swartz]

Nice to see that they moved away from the Celeron based machine.

[Mikerowaved]

I dealt with a SUPER slow clerk PC once and it ended up being a bad hard drive (spinning kind). Looking at the Event Viewer I could see all the errors and timeouts it was throwing. I replaced it with a 2.5" SATA SSD and it ran much better than it ever did.

I think it was that same batch of PC's that shipped with 4GB of RAM, which is marginal to run Windows 10 with. I upgraded them all to 8GB and that solved some slowness issues as well. Something else to look at.

Neither upgrades were very expensive and definitely improved the user experience until they were finally replaced with the current PC models.

[russellhltn]

I'm hearing that SSDs can also suffer from slowness. If the data gets weak, it will struggle to read, but refuse to give up or flag an error. If you re-write the data, it suddenly goes much faster.

But yes, a failing hard drive will bring a PC to an unusable crawl because the drive will not under any circumstances admit failure. It would rather retry 70 times 70.