Solved! System Uncharacteristically Slow [Lenovo Ideapad 520]

[Iamanugget42]

Hey folks,

For the past six months I've been using a Lenovo Ideapad 520 laptop for general purposes, and I've been suffering from some ridiculously slow speeds for... pretty much everything since I bought it. It's got decent specs; an i5-8250U CPU CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM and a GeForce MX150 GPU, so I'm rather confused as to why the processing speeds are so slow.

From booting Microsoft Word to browsing Chrome, wait times for simple actions can be minutes long. This also applies to using the search bar in Windows; this seems to particularly upset the system. Furthermore, the boot speeds are 3-4 minutes on average. I don't use it for gaming, as this is my school laptop, and I performed a clean install of Windows 10 earlier today and the problems are persisting.

I do suspect the HDD (and by extension, lack of an SSD) may be the issue, however it doesn't always max at 100% usage or anything when the PC is slow, which is confusing. The HDD is a Seagate ST2000LM007, at 5400 RPM (which isn't terribly fast, but not awfully sluggish either).

Any help in potential system configs or recommendations for other action would be largely appreciated.

Thanks,
Jackie.

 

[prince_xaine]

You are correct. It is the HDD. The HDD is the slowest component on a computer. If you know how, you should create a bootable windows disk then install windows to a SSD. You won't ever go back.

 

[prince_xaine]

You are correct. It is the HDD. The HDD is the slowest component on a computer. If you know how, you should create a bootable windows disk then install windows to a SSD. You won't ever go back.

 

[Iamanugget42]

You are correct. It is the HDD. The HDD is the slowest component on a computer. If you know how, you should create a bootable windows disk then install windows to a SSD. You won't ever go back.

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah, I had a feeling that was gonna be the limiting factor. A while ago I ordered a drive caddy to replace my optical drive with an SSD I have lying around since there are no extra slots for an SSD straight up in the laptop, but the caddy itself was damaged and I never got around to getting a refund. I'll be sure to replace it ASAP, thanks for the diagnosis!

 

[prince_xaine]

You're welcome!