Upgraded HDD. Laptop now sooo slooooooow. PLEASE help!

Hi Everyone,

I have a Sony Vaio VPCEC2SOE laptop (Core i5 2.3ghz or thereabouts, 6Gb Ram, Windows 8.1).

The original HDD was getting way too full so I bought a 1TB Samsung disk from Amazon. Prior to changing the disk, this laptop has always been fast enough. It handled pretty much everything I needed without any real performance issues. I don't play modern games so that's not an issue. Half Life 2 and Dirt are good enough for me.

Since fitting the new HDD and installing windows things are terrible. Sometimes it seems adequate but that's about it. When I open windows explorer the folders often show 'empty' while the green bar at the top slowly crawls across to the right, eventually showing me the contents after a minute or more.

As the disk is quite big I have partitioned it. I always have done anyway. I have C obviously, then D which is my 'Files' partition.

In task manager the disk performance is often at 100% then it might drop to zero for a few seconds, then back at 100%, even when just writing this.

All software is the same as with the old disk so nothing there I don't think.

In the disk management window I have as follows.

C: 150.24 GB NTFS (healthy (boot, page file, blah blah)

D: Data 488.28 GB NTFS Healthy (logical drive)

276.05 GB Healthy (primary partition) - this is my Ubuntu partition. Windows was slow before I installed this. For what it's worth, Ubuntu is not as slow as Windows but slower than it should be I think.

5.86 GB Healthy (primary partition) - dunno what this is for!

Have I partitioned this incorrectly? Drive D where all my personal files are (dropbox sync, google drive, plus local stuff seems the slowest of them all.

Any advice greatly appreciated. At the moment I am considering ripping this drive out and using in a USB enclosure for backups only.

Thanks in advance
Richard



I have just installed and run 3d Mark 7. My overall score is 265

My scores in detail are:

PCMark score
265.0
Video playback and transcoding / Video playback
2.96546 fps
Video playback iteration 1
2.94574 fps
Video playback iteration 2
2.97389 fps
Video playback iteration 3
2.97674 fps
Video playback and transcoding / Video transcoding - downscaling
1.0 B/s
Video transcoding - downscaling iteration 1
1.0 B/s
Video transcoding - downscaling iteration 2
1.0 B/s
Video transcoding - downscaling iteration 3
1.0 B/s
System storage - gaming / System storage - gaming
3.64364 MB/s
System storage - gaming iteration 1
3.66803 MB/s
System storage - gaming iteration 2
3.66857 MB/s
System storage - gaming iteration 3
3.59433 MB/s
Graphics - DirectX 9 / Graphics - DirectX 9
12.43982 fps
Graphics - DirectX 9 iteration 1
12.43408 fps
Graphics - DirectX 9 iteration 2
12.49134 fps
Graphics - DirectX 9 iteration 3
12.39403 fps
Image manipulation / Image manipulation
11.967 Mpx/s
Image manipulation iteration 1
12.09639 Mpx/s
Image manipulation iteration 2
11.9499 Mpx/s
Image manipulation iteration 3
11.85472 Mpx/s
System storage - importing pictures / System storage - importing pictures
4.94754 MB/s
System storage - importing pictures iteration 1
4.57037 MB/s
System storage - importing pictures iteration 2
5.1033 MB/s
System storage - importing pictures iteration 3
5.16894 MB/s
Web browsing and decrypting / Web browsing
5.22027 pages/s
Web browsing iteration 1
4.67684 pages/s
Web browsing iteration 2
4.8409 pages/s
Web browsing iteration 3
6.14307 pages/s
Web browsing and decrypting / Data decrypting
44.64398 MB/s
Data decrypting iteration 1
43.52378 MB/s
Data decrypting iteration 2
45.92643 MB/s
Data decrypting iteration 3
44.48173 MB/s
System storage - Windows Defender / System storage - Windows Defender
1.13196 MB/s
System storage - Windows Defender iteration 1
1.14375 MB/s
System storage - Windows Defender iteration 2
1.12425 MB/s
System storage - Windows Defender iteration 3
1.12787 MB/s

I hope these figures show just how terrible this now is.