New Laptop, slower than expected?

[Amnesia180]

Hi All,

I've recently got a Sony VAIO E11. I have read the reviews, and the most say it lacks slightly in power compared to other comparable laptops.

However, my local store had them on sale, and for me it will be perfect (I'm taking it away with me for several months with work to watch movies from the hard drive, surf the net and reply to emails etc) and skype home, so this will be fine.

However, I have spent the past day and a half uninstalling all the Sony VAIO Bloatware, and I have noticed an improvement. But there are some things that it continues to lag with.

At the time of writing this, I have google chrome open nothing running in the background apart from Vaio Smart Network, Bluestacks Agent, MSE and Vaio Care (which I can't stop from loading on startup).

It says there are 94 processes, the second I open task manager CPU usage is around 50% and physical memory at 46%.

Within a second the CPU usage drops to around 10% whilst the physical memory stays the same.

Is this normal? With a few applications it seems like it hangs for a few seconds before continuing with its operation... just wondering if there is anything else I can do to clean it up a little?

Edit: Forgot to add, if I am browsing and watching videos on youtube, the CPU usage shoots to between 55% and 70%, sometimes reaching 80% and I hear the fan start to whiz pretty fast! Normal?
Thanks all
Amnesia

 

[Jacee]

Look in "Services" to see if you can disable or start Vaio Care manually.

90 processes sounds extremely high!

 

[Jacee]

You can download Process Explorer to see all the process that are running (look in the left column) Windows Sysinternals: Documentation, downloads and additional resources

 

[Alejandro85]

If you bought it with a pre-installed system, most likely it will have loads of crapware and advertising software and demos that you'll never use, most notebooks vendors do that actually.
Instead of uninstalling it "the good way", I would simply reformat it and do a clean install to make sure you get a fresh OS with your fresh laptop. Most times you'll spend more time uninstalling thing that on reinstalling Windows/drivers/programs.

 

[Amnesia180]

Thank you for the replies all.

I have spent a long time transferring all my music, photos, some films across. All in all, approximately 250GB (from a very old HDD that I cased in an External HDD case... so it isn't the fastest).

I've pretty much removed everything now, but I will download that software and see if there are other processes I can remove.

Another question; the laptop keeps asking me to create boot CDs incase anything fatal happens. However, my netbook doesn't have a CD drive! So even if I got an external one, my system won't recognise the USB will it?

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Another question; the laptop keeps asking me to create boot CDs incase anything fatal happens. However, my netbook doesn't have a CD drive! So even if I got an external one, my system won't recognise the USB will it?

It's actually pretty common nowadays, and last time I checked, USB external CD drives are recognized by BIOS, so even if the computer refuses to boot you can plug them through USB and they work.

Still, a boot CD is a bit outdated nowadays (as you may have noticed a lot of laptops don't even bother to have a DVD drive). I also have some doubts about what is telling you to do the boot CDs, make sure it isn't another useless program installed by the manufacturer.

I recommend grabbing a 4 GB USB pendrive for cheap and making a USB Win7 install pendrive, that is better than that CD in any respect (yes, BIOS does recognize pendrives as well, just as external CD drives). And since it is basically an installation disk, it can repair and do all what a repair CD does, plus do a full install if necessary.
This is the tutorial to make the USB win7 installation pendrive (if you don't have a Win7 disk, read below).
This is the tutorial that guides you in the reinstallation of Win 7 (which is usually the best way to get rid of all unwanted nonsense they install on your machine), and also contains a link to clean win7 installation disk iso files you need if you want to make the pendrive.

Btw, telling us your full system specs would be useful, this forum's official tool that does it automatically is here (step 7 of that tutorial to upload the specs automatically).

 

[Amnesia180]

Thanks very much.

I have installed the process monitor, but I have no idea how to use it. When i start up the laptop, it has 96 processes running, but this monitor is showing 35,000 events! If I knew what to do with it I could post back here and maybe that would help?

Thanks for the idea about the pen drive, that is a great idea and one I will go ahead with. The whole idea of me getting a 11.6" laptop was portability (to watch films on the move, keep in contact with family etc) so to have to carry a DVD and DVD Drive around would be pointless, the pen drive sounds a lot better.

My specs, have now been filled out.

 

[gigagiggles]

"I have installed the process monitor, ..."

Of the three programs that I know of from Sysinternals, you had to pick the "wrong" one. LOL.

ProcessExplorer will list the processes that are running, just like taskmanager does.

Autoruns will list the programs that starts during bootup. This should prove useful as you try to trim down the number of programs and their processes from running, just by unticking them.