Long delay opening programs

[SpuffMonkey]

Just looking at a friend's new (to them) laptop today and saw that it was taking around 30 seconds to open each new program. Its a standalone machine connected to broadband - anyone got any ideas on what might be causing it - it was a rebuilt Toshiba with W7 on it - I'm sure I've seen something similar before, but can't remember what it was. Its pretty snappy once the program is open.

 

Cheers

[simpsonj]

Sounds like an issue I had with my laptop so try this from my blog:

 

Windows likes to do something called 'Write-caching'. In theory, this speeds up performance of your machine, and prevent data loss in the event of a power outage. All very sensible. The problem is, the data loss part of the equation absolutely kills the performance as the hard drive is in near 100% usage all the time. From the moment I turned the laptop on, disk usage was at 100%. After around 5-10 minutes, it would dip to 90% or so, and the laptop became usable.I had come to accept this as part of the laptop usual routine, blaming the slow speed of the hard drive. However, this does not need to be the case!

 

After my laptop became slow and unresponsive loading up the basic Mail client, I started to look around and noticed something in the system tray called 'Intel Rapid Storage Technology'. Thinking that my storage wasn't being particularly rapid, I loaded up the application. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, however there was a message talking about the Windows write-cache buffer flushing policy, and that disabling it can improve performance. Thinking anything is worth a try, I followed the instructions, written below for your convenience:

 

 

Right click the bottom left hand corner of your screen, this should open a drop down menu, choose Device Manager.

From Device manager, expand Disk drives.

Right click your disk drive, and open properties.

Choose the Policies Tab.

Tick the tick box next to "Turn off Windows write cache buffer flushing on this device."

Click OK.