John wrote:
On Tuesday, March 3, 2020 at 7:06:52 PM UTC, John Rumm wrote:
On 03/03/2020 17:55, Harry Bloomfield wrote:
I have asked to look at the above, which sort of runs, but in treacle
mode. Takes forever to boot up, press a button and it will maybe respond
5 minutes later.
There is a party trick I have seen some of these play where they
throttle back to a very low clock speed all the time. Going into the
BIOS and resetting to default BIOS settings will fix that one. (might
also be worth checking for BIOS upgrades while you are at it).
Having said that, its a slow machine to start with. About the only thing
you can do to make any real difference would be to clone the HDD onto a
SSD.
It has Win10 installed on it, it seems to have a reasonable spec. I'm
wondering if there should be a recovery CD for it, or if anyone knows
where I could download from and burn a CD?
It will have a recovery partition. So you can recover to the supplied
image (which is unlikely to be Win 10).
Failing that you can download Win 10 from MS - just search for download
Win 10. That will get you the media creation tool which will either
upgrade the machine its being run on, or let you write a boot image to
USB or DVD.
For the utilities etc, there will likely be a tag number of some kind on
it that you may be able to use on the Lenovo web site to take you to the
right set of utilities.
--
Cheers,
John.
Why do machines with fast multi-core processors end up being unbearably slow?
The reasons must be known and easily fixable.
Run a copy of Process Monitor and find out.
On occasion, I've seen *10,000* registry accesses per second. They
repeat at 1 second intervals, some of these things. Even when the
registry is cached in RAM, this can't be good.
These have *nothing* to do with what you see on the screen.
Think of this as a "tax" you pay for modernity.
You don't really know how "busy" these newer OSes are, until you
look under the hood.
*******
Let's look at the B50-30
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo....123805.0.html
Processor Intel Celeron N2815 $107 tray price
Bay Trail 2 Core (no hyperthreading), 1.86GHz
Likely thermally limited. If no fan is present, will throttle.
Memory: 2048 MB (up to DDR3L 1066, OK)
"55.86%: Such a bad rating is rare. There exist hardly any notebooks,
which are rated worse." === notebookcheck rating
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-2-13-ghz.html
Cache = 1MB ("I'm not dead yet"...) # Only an issue when running 7ZIP compression
# Doesn't say what the L1 uses, which could be an issue
Max # of Memory Channels 2 # Means the memory bus is not gimped!
# This is important for snappy graphics
# (like if you unplug a DIMM)
Processor Graphics = "Intel HD Graphics for Intel Atom Processor Z3700 Series"
This is a 4 E.U. GPU as the built-in graphics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvermont
Scroll down the list here for Execution Units, and see just how low this is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ocessing_units
8,10,12,24 The above is pretty low, but only needs to be able to
composite graphics windows into system memory (as the GPU
has no memory of its own). Only games would be horribly gimped.
What of Bay Trail. Well, you're in luck, as it's the first
generation of Atom to get "out-of-order (OoO) execution". The Atom
processors before this generation, were in-order execution, which
means in effect that the max number of instructions retired per
clock would be a lot lower. In-order execution means the instructions
are serialized, with more stalls.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013...-architecture/
In-order execution was selected for the other ones, in the belief that
this would reduce power consumption. Which it probably did.
In the text here, you can see that Atom wasn't "pure" in-order. It
dabbled a bit in OoO. But only a bit.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2493/8
The concern is, does the next one claimed to be OoO also cheat ?
That's the $107 question.
You could run a bench on this device and find out. Let's just look some
up. Single threaded operation is used for a lot of everyday tasks, so
we'll use that. Now, I have a 2C 2T (no hyperthreading processor) too,
that I'm typing this on, so we can compare to that for fun.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
N2815 1.86GHz (plus turbo) Passmark CPUMark = 455 2C 2T
E8400 3.00GHz (no turbo!) Passmark CPUMark = 1218 2C 2T
Even though my CPU is 50% faster on clock, it's pretty close to 3X faster.
That means the IPC is about 2X better.
And more modern processors with the same clock range, would be
that much better again on IPC improvements (because they'd
include Hyperthreading for 30% more, plus be able to
retire more instructions per clock and have fewer bottlenecks).
Hyperthreading varies from -5% to +30% or so, and in some
cases, it can actually be better to turn it off in the BIOS.
Especially if the OS process scheduler is "defective" in some way.
I would need to downclock my E8400 quite a bit, to pull neck and
neck with the N2815. So low in fact, I might even be below the
recommended spec for Windows 10.
I have a single core laptop, running Windows 10, and it's no
wonder pony either. The Passmark on that one is
AMD V120 2.2Ghz (no turbo, single core) Passmark CPUMark = 665 1C 1T
and it's still 50% better. Mine is a single core, which means
the N2815 is ahead of it (some I/O can run on one core, while
a calc runs on the other core, for example).
I put an SSD drive in the laptop, and well, that's a joke. It
boots faster, but after that, it's a wash. The chipset is
only SATA II.
You could disable Windows Defender and get some of the
performance back. But is it worth doing that ? You decide.
Windows maintenance functions will not run on all cores,
and the maintenance is limited to using fewer cores so
something is left for the user. There is Windows Defender
and there is Search Indexer, wasting performance that could
be used reading the newspaper.
My laptop is also not running 1909 at the moment, and is
using an older version of Windows 10. You can also rip
Windows Update out of it, as an option. What fun. There's
a lot of fun to be had. Between TrustedInstaller and wuauserv,
they waste a lot of cycles during updates. Even checking for
updates wastes cycles.
Which is better, an unpatched, exploit-riddled older OS
that runs at a decent speed, or a bloated over-patched
modern OS ? Good question. How lucky do you feel ?
For best results, Windows 7 is recommended, just so
there is a choice amongst web browsers. And there's
DXVA2 so the movie decoder works. (This assumes the 4 E.U.
graphics *has* accelerated movie decoding.)
I'm surprised they charge $107 for that processor. Of course,
they charge $350 for some laptop processors, and we pay a
rather large premium for such things.
Paul