New laptop running extremely slow

performance

I've purchased an Alienware m14x laptop but I am experiencing performance issues – It's slow. Quite slow actually. My other laptop that has a Celeron CPU is going faster than this and that computer is running Windows XP and while the new one is running Windows 7 Home.

I'm not sure if it's just me or the laptop? The specification is as follows;

  • Intel Core i7 -2630m,
  • 6GB RAM,
  • 750GB 7200 rpm,
  • Nvidia 555m

There aren't a load of programs starting up at boot, but there are some and they are small programs. I closed some of them off using msconfig but it's still quite slow. By quite slow I mean, it takes quite a bit of time to log on, or if one user is logged on and nothing is happening within that user, and I switch to another one, its very slow and laggy. It's hard to even browse or stream movies.

For instance, when I first got it out of the box it was fast, I could play Deus Ex almost at cap highest performance. Now I have notch the entire game down to a medium due to lag or frame skipping. I have had an error where I would be playing the game and my graphics card failed and it shut off. It only happened once but it was quite frustrating.

Day 3 of the laptop and I have a line of dead pixels on the right side and I called technical support and they will be replacing my screen.

So my concern is, should I call the company and notify them that this laptop is not preforming to the standards it should be? Or am I mistaken and this is how it's supposed to be?

Best Answer

The lag could also be due to heat. Unlikely, but possible as graphics cards and processors these days downclock themselves to prevent overheating at certain temperatures. Tools like GPUZ and CPUZ will help you determine if they are downclocking due to heat.

Outside of that, without more information, we don't know what is "slow" and what should be "fast."

Your best bet is to post numbers. Fire up Performance Monitor and Open up the Data Collector Sets. Open the System node and select the default System Performance data set. Rightclick it (the cube) on the left hand side and select start.

This data set is configured to run indefinitely and collect a lot of useful data. It will sample every one second and records basically every counter under CPU, DISK, MEMORY, network card, and processes. Run it for a couple of hours and upload it. Don't sleep your computer because it is not set to autostart.

edit

BTW, to get to the reports, just look for the node reports in Perfmon. They are stored under C:\perflogs.

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