Give me a break!

[arzac93]

My laptop has problems.

About a month ago, I noticed that my HP Pavilion 15 'sleekbook' Windows 8 laptop was slowing down and hanging quite frequently. Noticing a high disk usage by "System" on the task manager, I immediately googled for a solution and came upon a few. Disabling the paging file, Superfetch and some other services .etc. They did little to solve my troubles.

I then decided to do a clean reinstall of Windows 8. That didn't help as I had hoped. . I tweaked around with services.msc only to end up worse than I started with. They did nothing to help with the high disk usage by System. My once average start up time of ~15 seconds had gone up to an all time high of 5 minutes

I promptly went for a "Refresh" in the settings. It was around that time I noticed a faint clicking/grinding noise coming from my hard drive. Went on to disable HP's Driveguard. Didn't help. The thing is, it doesn't happen all the time. Mainly, but not limited to, startup. I can play my games quite smoothly but have to wait 10 seconds to open a friggin window.

Am I looking at a dying hard disk here? I ran chkdsk, Nothing unusual there.

Are there tools which I can use to pinpoint the culprit?

My specs are i5-3317u processor, 6 GB ram, 1 TB hard disk, Nvidia GT 630 graphic card.

Any response will be appreciated and excuse my English.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Is it still under warranty?

I would try to reinstall Windows again and make sure you completely format the drive and everything, or try a copy of Windows 7 if you have it handy.

If neither of those do the trick, I would send it off for repairs if you are under warranty cause the drive may be failing.
If the warranty is expired, I would try opening it up because it could have developed a dust build up quickly and cause it to perform slow.

Also I have a favor to ask when you get a moment working on your system. I have a curiosity about the Nvidia GT 630 and would love a screen shot of GPUz on your system.

 

[arzac93]

Is it still under warranty?

I would try to reinstall Windows again and make sure you completely format the drive and everything, or try a copy of Windows 7 if you have it handy.

If neither of those do the trick, I would send it off for repairs if you are under warranty cause the drive may be failing.
If the warranty is expired, I would try opening it up because it could have developed a dust build up quickly and cause it to perform slow.

Also I have a favor to ask when you get a moment working on your system. I have a curiosity about the Nvidia GT 630 and would love a screen shot of GPUz on your system.

2 months left. I'll be giving it but that won't be for another month due to some problems. Until then, I could do with a quick fix.

I'll get around to the screenshot, man. It's a gt 630m and overclocked using MSI Afterburner.

 

[IInuyasha74]

For a quick fix like I said I would try to go with WIndows 7. If its some sort of driver issue this could fix the problem.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I have been trying to change my settings up on my 620M. According to Nvidia's website which makes very little sense, the 620M and 630M are the same graphics chip, but the 620M can have a 64 or 128-bit interface while the 630 was only a 64-bit interface. I think maybe they got that all mixed up.

===Editing this, its actually the 625M that is 64-bit only and doesn't make sense. The 630M is 128-bit only, with a 66% chance to have the same GPU but at a faster speed.

How are you doing with overclocking? I tried to boost mine a little, and I pushed the RAM higher but the core clock won't let me change it.

 

[arzac93]

My system doesn't have an optical drive. Disposed of, in HP's quest to design a "sleeker" machine.

If I can't install Win7 by drive, then what can I do?

I can push the core clock a bit(100mHz) . Doesn't make the unplayable playable. Just a smoother experience.

Wierd. Mine's a 64bit gf117 at 40nm.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Ahh I would hate that. Even worst comes to worst I prefer having an optical drive, because if nothing else you can remove it and install a second HDD.

If you install Windows 7 it should be able to do everything you do currently. You could keep windows 7 and use it like that and never return it, assuming it fixes the problem, or you can just use it for a few weeks until you can send it to HP for repairs.

I personally prefer Windows 7, but thats a personal decision.

Sounds like you got very unfortunate. The GT 630M are supposed to exclusively have 128-bit interface, but it achieves this by using two chips that give 64-bit interface each adding up to 128-bit. So since the first type of chip made by Nvidia with this design, the Nvidia GT 430, some companies have cut costs on it by only putting one of these interface chips. Its really low for a company since it only saves I would guess probably like $1 tops. The performance penalty on the GPU for this is raver severe. The GT 630M with a 128-bit interface gets about a 28% performance boost over the 620M 64-bit interface judging by frame retes.

If on the same 64-bit interface, it is likely you would only see 8% boost in performance at maximum even after your overclock. These chips are starved of memory bandwidth big time. Thats why I overclocked my RAM first thing. Wish I could OC the GPU also, and I am thinking to try something to do it because it refuses to turbo at all.

The bright side, if you have a gf117 its actually on 28nm construction and so its much more power efficient. Mine says the same thing, but the gf117 is a 28nm chip.

 

[arzac93]

Ahh I would hate that. Even worst comes to worst I prefer having an optical drive, because if nothing else you can remove it and install a second HDD.

If you install Windows 7 it should be able to do everything you do currently. You could keep windows 7 and use it like that and never return it, assuming it fixes the problem, or you can just use it for a few weeks until you can send it to HP for repairs.

I personally prefer Windows 7, but thats a personal decision.

Sounds like you got very unfortunate. The GT 630M are supposed to exclusively have 128-bit interface, but it achieves this by using two chips that give 64-bit interface each adding up to 128-bit. So since the first type of chip made by Nvidia with this design, the Nvidia GT 430, some companies have cut costs on it by only putting one of these interface chips. Its really low for a company since it only saves I would guess probably like $1 tops. The performance penalty on the GPU for this is raver severe. The GT 630M with a 128-bit interface gets about a 28% performance boost over the 620M 64-bit interface judging by frame retes.

If on the same 64-bit interface, it is likely you would only see 8% boost in performance at maximum even after your overclock. These chips are starved of memory bandwidth big time. Thats why I overclocked my RAM first thing. Wish I could OC the GPU also, and I am thinking to try something to do it because it refuses to turbo at all.

The bright side, if you have a gf117 its actually on 28nm construction and so its much more power efficient. Mine says the same thing, but the gf117 is a 28nm chip.

That sucks. Anyway here's the screenshot you wanted :
http/s8.postimg.org/8zuouc81h/scrshot.gif

Looks like I'm just gonna have to wait it out then.

BTW How did you overclock the ram?

 

[IInuyasha74]

You have a really nice clock speed. I wish I could get mine that high, I am locked at 625. Thanks for pic.

I used MSI Afterburner, and just pushed it up. If you try it make sure you keep an eye on the FPS when you are testing. I could get mine to go up to 1000 easily but it was having a weird effect of FPS being as they should, then would drop down to almost single digits for a few seconds and then raise back. I had to drop the speed to keep this from happening, so mine topped out at 980Mhz. It is a small boost, but since these are starved big time on memory bandwidth it still gave a boost of a few FPS increase.

I don't remember exactly how much, but give me a second while I run the benchmark at the base memory speed and I will tell you so you know if its worth your time to mess with it or not.

 

[sDGam]

Since you have things overclocked why dont you try to get them to stock settings? Laptops aren't really made for overclocking. Could be voltage or overheating problem affecting the rest of the hardware

 

[IInuyasha74]

Since you have things overclocked why dont you try to get them to stock settings? Laptops aren't really made for overclocking. Could be voltage or overheating problem affecting the rest of the hardware

Being a laptop, all overclocking would have to be done by a 3rd party program like MSI Afterburner.

In this case, when he did a clean reinstall of Windows 8, the system wouldn't have had MSI Afterburner present and the clock would have been at its default settings. This didn't cure the problem.