Tech Support Guy banner
Status
Not open for further replies.

Thinkpad runs slow on Sundays

3K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  pedroguy 
#1 ·
I have a new Lenova Thinkpad (still some connection to IBM) T500. Just got it this past Monday. I was working late Saturday night, when at 00:00 Sunday morning the laptop slowed to a critically low level of performance.

I began to shutdown applications and tray apps. It did not help and was so slow. So I shutdown, waited a few minutes (possible heat issues?), and powered back up. It booted ok and windows seemed to load at the normal rate, but the hard drive never stopped being accessed. I decided that there was either a disk issue or a misbehaving application or driver. So I looked in the Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) and selected the 'Performance' Tab, which showed that the CPU utilization percentage was constantly between 80-100%. I waited for 10 minutes to see if it ever settled to a normal value, and it did not. I then selected the 'Processes' Tab to see which process was hogging the CPU. It showed an application named egather2.exe was constantly using between 50-80% CPU utilization.

I rebooted the laptop and started the ThinkPad utilities by pressing the blue 'ThinkVantage' keyboard button during the boot sequence. I looked at the event log there, and found numerous IBM applications failures. These applications appear to be used for gathering 'Asset Information'. I think that the information that is gathered is probably used for the online support that they and lenova offer.

I used my home desktop to lookup the egather2.exe file, and found a reference to another ThinkPad owner who had this problem, but only on Sundays. I figured that IBM/Lenova has this application scheduled to re-gather information once per week, on Sundays.
So I rebooted and pressed 'F1' while booting to enter the BIOS utility. I changed the date to Monday's date then rebooted. Everything was running normally again.

I will continue to investigate this application, and will either fix it's functionality or disable it. I personally am leaning towards disabling it after I know how to fix it, as I don't like someone else deciding when my computer should transmit information. But I do want to be able to allow it to gather the information, at my discretion for support.

Coltsfan:up:
 
See less See more
Status
Not open for further replies.
You have insufficient privileges to reply here.
Top