Question Below Average CPU Performance

[TotiDog]

Hi,
I hope someone can help me. I seem to have 2 issues with my new laptop.

Issue #1 - Slow Copy Rate to external hard drives:
I have a large music collection. When copying the entire collection to a backup drive (external), the copy rate is slow. It sometimes slows to 0kb/s. Yet at times it will speed up to 90mb/s.

Issue #2 – Frequent stuttering when playing music:
When just playing songs, every 3 or 4 songs there will be a split second of silence during song play. (Stuttering, similar to buffering but the music is from the hard drive and not played from the internet.) This is super annoying.

Machine Specifications are: Lenova Ideapad L3 15ITL6 with processor: 64bit, 11th Gen Intel(R) Core (TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz 2.42 GHz with 20GB Ram

I have scanned all drives for errors. No errors found. I have defragmented and optimized all drives (I do this once per week.)

Lenova internal diagnostics tool indicates the following whilst copying:
Processor performance varies between 14%-50% (Not sure why this is low?)
Memory performance indicated 7GB of 20GB used (Why not all of the memory?)

This machine is reasonably new (6 months). I am not sure about guarantee issues, as I bought it new in South Africa (where I registered my purchase with Lenova), but I have since migrated to Australia. I do not know if Lenova Australia will honour the guarantee on my purchase.

 

[geofelt]

What kinds of drives are involved?
HDD or SSD?
SSD drives should never be defragged.

Copying to an external drive will be limited by the slower speed of the usb connection.


SSD random performance is some 40x faster than on a HDD.
If you are playing songs from a HDD, you may have stutters.

The cpu utilization is low for two reasons.
1 the slower speed of the connection is letting the cpu loaf.
2 Only one or two of your 8 threads are needed to do the job.

Windows keeps unused code in ram in anticipation of reuse.
It also keeps some ram free. The ram you need to run is a small part of what is available.

 

[A_Goat]

Hi,
I hope someone can help me. I seem to have 2 issues with my new laptop.

Issue #1 - Slow Copy Rate to external hard drives:
I have a large music collection. When copying the entire collection to a backup drive (external), the copy rate is slow. It sometimes slows to 0kb/s. Yet at times it will speed up to 90mb/s.

Issue #2 – Frequent stuttering when playing music:
When just playing songs, every 3 or 4 songs there will be a split second of silence during song play. (Stuttering, similar to buffering but the music is from the hard drive and not played from the internet.) This is super annoying.

Machine Specifications are: Lenova Ideapad L3 15ITL6 with processor: 64bit, 11th Gen Intel(R) Core (TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz 2.42 GHz with 20GB Ram

I have scanned all drives for errors. No errors found. I have defragmented and optimized all drives (I do this once per week.)

Lenova internal diagnostics tool indicates the following whilst copying:
Processor performance varies between 14%-50% (Not sure why this is low?)
Memory performance indicated 7GB of 20GB used (Why not all of the memory?)

This machine is reasonably new (6 months). I am not sure about guarantee issues, as I bought it new in South Africa (where I registered my purchase with Lenova), but I have since migrated to Australia. I do not know if Lenova Australia will honour the guarantee on my purchase.

When transferring the data slowing and ramping up is normal behavior, as the transfer rate can far exceed the write speed of the drive, assuming it's a mechanical backup drive.
What application are you using to play the music? Are you multi-tasking during music playing?

You shouldn't have to be manually doing anything for your internal drives maintenance, the "optimize drives" tool in windows should be taking care of that for you automatically by default, even if it's an SSD.

 

[kerberos_20]

sound skipping, either hdd issue or driver issue
in task manager look for hdd utilisation, if it spikes during song play, it could be reason why music would pause
for driver issue use latencymon

 

[uWebb429]

@TotiDog

hdd issue

I would agree with that. These IdeaPad laptops originally came with 5400 rpm mechanical hard drives. These are obsolete. In 2022, even if one of these drives is not officially failing, it should still be tossed in the trash. This laptop supports NvME SSD drives, either 2242 or 2280 for length.

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/IdeaPad/IdeaPad_L3_15ITL6/IdeaPad_L3_15ITL6_Spec.pdf

A modern SSD drive can solve a lot of problems.

I would also run ThrottleStop.

ThrottleStop 9.6 Download

ThrottleStop is a small application designed to monitor for and correct the three main types of CPU throttling that are being used on many lapto

www.techpowerup.com

Check the MMIO Lock box in the TPL window.
Check the Lock PROCHOT Offset box in the Options window.

Some Lenovo laptops vary the thermal throttling temperature. This can be the cause of a lot of throttling issues.