11/21/15 6:56 PM

More stuff about my new laptop setup.

I have a 1Tb external hard drive. Some of you may remember that going to Win10 magically gave me an extra 300Gb - the drive was showing only 20Gb free with Win7 but 350Gb free with Win10.

At any rate, I set up the external HD as my recovery drive (as recommended in the Dell quick start drive) and now the thing is showing a total capacity of 34Gb. Funny thing is that I put a copy (not a backup but an actual copy) of all my files from my SSD onto the external HD - those files show a total of about 50Gb on my SSD but only 10Gb on the external HD. Can the compression be that much? And where did the other 965Gb go?

At everyone's recommendation I got an SSD instead of an internal HD, hoping for much faster saves and opening of documents. Not happening. If anything, saves are slower than they were on my 6 year old laptop with internal HD. Any ideas why the SSD would be slower?

11/21/15 11:27 PM

SSD: Do you have a USB thumb drive plugged in? Those can affect Explorer performance, the refresh.

File system: Another way to assess a file system is comparing the number of files not just the size. If you're comfortable with the command prompt chkdsk is still a good tool.

A disk space report like that would make me anxious, sorry.

11/22/15 10:47 PM

Download an SSD benchmarking utility and use it to check the SSD. If you get ok results there, then the problem is not with the SSD but elsewhere. When I test the SSD (an OCZ Vertex4) in my desktop machine, on sequential reads I get 425 MB/s and on sequential writes 380MB/s (the SSD is cabled to a SATA III 6GB/s port).

11/23/15 7:17 AM

Is returning you new laptop for another one an option?

Seems you run into a lot of problem with this one...

11/23/15 1:23 PM

quote:

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If anything, saves are slower than they were on my 6 year old laptop with internal HD.

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11/23/15 5:28 PM

So I connected with Dell to address the problems and they tell me the SSD is fine. They also repartitioned the external HD and now I have my 1Tb capacity back. When I (mistakenly) designated the HD as my recovery device the Win10 system partitioned it into a 32GB drive with the other 970Gb left in the ether. That's fixed.

I downloaded a benchmarking program and got decent (not great) scores for the SSD but that can no way explain the "save speed" problem. I checked a large WORD file (125K words) and it too about 5 minutes to save! I called the MS Office help line and they were baffled. Then they had me create a new WORD document and save it. Of course it saved almost instantly at which point MS said "that proves there's nothing wrong with WORD" but for $140 they would try to sort out my issue. I hung up on them.

I've tried multiple WORD files and they all save slowly in proportion to the file size. MS tried to talk about imbedded graphics or add-ins but I have none of that. Excel saves quickly and I checked a 90Mb PowerPoint and it saved in a couple of seconds.

Obviously Office 2016 is brand new but I couldn't find anything about this problem. For now my only path forward is to save well in advance of needing to shut down and hope that MS finds this to be an issue for multiple users and offers a fix.

11/25/15 8:45 PM

Worked with the MS Office support team for literally hours today. In the end they had me not just uninstall Office but gave me a bunch of registry entries to delete along with key files. Reinstalled MS Office but no change. MS told me that if I wanted to pursue this further I needed to buy a $150 1-yr service contract.

In the process of working through this I learned a bunch of "features" of this problem. For example, it takes 5 minutes to save a 700K WORD file but a 65Mb 170 page PowerPoint file saves in a few seconds. Large Excel files safe in a second or two. And most curious, when you close a WORD file without saving first, and it asks you to save, and you click yes, the file that takes 5 minutes to save normally saves in 15 seconds.

15 seconds still seems slow to me but it is incredible that the file can save 20X faster because you close it than a normal save. Something's not right here but it looks like I'm going to have to live with it.

11/25/15 8:55 PM

Install Open Office and see if the same thing happens saving in Open Office and MS Office formats.

https://www.openoffice.org/

I quite M$ Office a long while ago...

I don't know if one still might need to do biz with others where MS Orifice has to be used... As far as if there are any Open Orifice issues with being saved in MS modes.

Anyone?

11/29/15 4:38 PM

So my daughter and her boyfriend came to visit for turkey day and I told them of my problem. Both are pretty knowledgeable about computers and so looked over my shoulder while we worked on this. We turned on the Performance Monitor to see it was obvious what was causing the slow save but nothing showed up.

We then did File, Options, Advanced to see if there were any strange things to look at. We looked under Save and the "allow background saves" box was checked. Uncheck that box and the problem solved! Quick saves are now the rule of the day.

When background saves are enabled, you can continue to work on a document or other documents whereas without it once you hit save WORD is essentially locked until the save is finished. The price you pay for allowing background saves is that a save can take several minutes. Funny that the MS Office help desk didn't spot this or realize that it could be an issue.

At any rate, it's all better now.

11/29/15 5:05 PM

"Funny that the MS Office help desk didn't spot this or realize that it could be an issue."

See what you'd have gotten for $140.00, screwed additionally...

Mandate to get your money perhaps, more of it that is....

11/29/15 5:38 PM

Oh yeah would I have been pi$$ed to have spent $140 and had them find this. I don't really trust this kind of "service" though I did have to avail myself of it once when I (apparently) somehow got in the death grip of some malware.