Not so elite
My dad bought himself a "really good" computer last year. Normally I spec them out for him, but this time he decided to get his own -- at age 93 . He ended up with a fairly impressive machine:
- 17" HP Elite (but with no touchscreen, oddly enough)
- 2.0-2.7HGz i7 CPU
- 12GB RAM
- 1TB hard drive, which was replaced by a 1TB solid state drive
- nVidia graphics board
- Backlit keyboard, CD/DVD drive, etc.
And then after a year he decided he didn't like it, and gave it to me -- as per usual. I am unsure what to do with it, so for now I am playing Obduction on it. Even with those specs, however, the fan roars while I play.
Problem One: Slow Speed
Despite the solid state drive, the computer felt slow, taking 3/4-minute to boot, etc. I finally traced the problem down to the solid state drive. It is a Samsung 850 Pro, and the nice thing about it is the utility software that makes your computer scream through intensive caching. (I use this model of solid state drive on all my computers.)
However, RAPID mode was not turned on for the SSD. The utility software would not turn it on, because it could not identify the operating system! Doing some research, I found that that version 4.x of the utility software has that bug; upgrading to 5.x would solve the problem.
It did. With RAPID mode turned on, it now does a cold boot in 16 seconds. That's satisfying.
Problem Two: Not Waking from Sleep
The slow speed (now solved) was irritating enough, but the second problem was just as bad: the Elite would not wake from sleep mode. When I close the lid, the Elite goes into sleep mode; when I open the lid, it does not wake up. Pressing the keyboard, the power button briefly, moving the mouse -- all to no avail: the screen remains blank.
The (annoying) solution is to hold down the power button until the computer turns off, and then turning it back on.
Research shows that the problem plagues many laptop models, ever since Windows 7, through 8.x, and now with 10 -- HP and other brands suffer from it. I don't have the problem with my HP Spectre, but here it was in my dad's Elite.
The solutions I found varied from installing the latest drivers to re-installing older drivers -- keyboard, mouse, graphics board, and so on. Checking that the keyboard and mouse would not shut down for "power saving" is sensible, but that was not set for my dad's laptop.
One suggestion was to change the "Lid closing" action from Sleep to Hibernation. Now, I have avoided hibernation mode, as in earlier years it was slower than starting from a cold boot, on older, slower computers. But with this computer cold-booting in 16 seconds, I figured, why not try it?
I tried it, and it works. When I raise the lid, the laptop comes out of hibernation mode. It is, of course, slower than emerging from sleep mode, but better than having to reboot the computer e-v-e-r-y s-i-n-g-l-e t-i-m-e.
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