I bought an Amilo M1439G two days ago, I bought it for 400 euro because the battery was missing and it had some very minor damage to the exterior. But the hardware was good so it didn't really matter. After turning it on, I immediately installed 3DMark 2001 SE to check the performance. It was about 2800 3DMarks, which wasn't really good but heck, it's a laptop. I then proceeded to reinstall Windows, using the latest drivers available (nVidia 84-series) from laptopvideo2go.com. I ran the 3DMark 2001 SE test again, I got 10.000 3DMarks ! That's a lot better ! When I later redid the test with sound (the Demo), the lag bug creeped up. Yes, my machine too, has one of the most irritating bugs. Funny thing is, I've seen this bug before on a computer of mine and it took me quite some time to fix it. So I went on a quest to kill the bug or at least minimize it.
What I do on all of my systems is turn off Indexing (the service and the checkbox on every harddrive), turn off the Windows Recovery, etc. etc. After that, the bug didn't disappear, what I expected.
I first read up on the many forum topics surrounding this (very real) bug. I then tried methods nobody else seemed to have done. I first tried removing some software that made my system
very unresponsive. I don't know exactly what it was, I think it was something that NHC (NoteBook Hardware Control) installed to monitor the harddrive. I also disabled checking the harddrive because it gave errors trying to read the SMART info.
So, that cleared the overal crappy responsiveness. But it still got the lag bug. I than tried PCI Latency Tool. It's a small program that lets you alter the PCI Latencies in your system. In many cases, this helps sluggishness on systems. So I gave it a try. I noticed everything except the VIA RAID controller and 3 other devices, used a PCI Latency of 64, while the rest had 0. So I changed them all to 0. It seemed the lag bug was reduced, it seemed to lag a lot less after about five 3DMark 2001 SE Demo runs. But it was still there !
Than I read something on a forum topic about a new VIA RAID driver named
VIA SATA RAID VT6421. It contains drivers, namely this one: VIA ComboRAID Software Package V4.40a
What I didn't expect was that that driver would solve the lag bug for me. As it seems, I haven't had any lag for hours, my system is very responsive. What I DO notice is that, when you expect the lag bug to occur, it doesn't freeze the system anymore, but it does slow down a bit. It seems to stutter a little, but sound doesn't repeat/stutter anymore ! A fair trade in my opinion.
Currently, I'm installing games, with the utmost hope of not encountering the lagbug again. As soon as I'm done, I'm going to ghost the drive to make sure I'm not able to fix it after a reinstall.