Generally sluggish new install

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A month+ ago I wiped my laptop and reinstalled Win7. In the process I also installed the current release of several major packages: Office 365, Quicken 2015, etc.

I noticed several of the new applications were extremely sluggish. For example it takes Quicken 10-15 seconds to start up, and I can see it replotting its screen many times while it’s waking up. Office apps are really slow, made worse by the fancy “gradual transition” model they use. I assumed they were just badly-implemented bloatware, since some other apps (like Thunderbird) seem to be doing fine.

But it’s more fundamental than that. The whole system seems slow. Perfect example: you know the “beep” that sounds when you try to overwrite a file? That beep doesn’t happen until five to FIFTEEN SECONDS after I’ve dismissed the error dialog!! It should happen instantly!

This is a totally fresh from-scratch install. This laptop used to perform great when it was new, and I expected it to do well with a fresh install. Any guesses how I might track down the problem??

Gary

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No suggestions? No ideas what could cause a totally fresh install to act like a slug?

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Try a Cleanboot:
https://support.microsoft.com/KB/929135?wa=wsignin1.0

Jerry

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There is a possibility that you had a bad re-install. If you have rulled that out or are not ready to re-reinstall yet, try Tweaking.com All-in-one. Be sure you do a clean boot first. Unplug all power sources, hit the start button several times, then reboot. A clean reboot should always be done before applying any corrective actions. I would also check to see how many programs are loading at boot up. Disable anything that is not needed immediately or does not need to run in the background all of the time.

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I tried timing the Quicken startup time as a metric. Maybe not the best or most representative test, but it’s repeatable and easy to measure.

After I’d been running my normal load for a day or two, with maybe 6GB of my 8GB RAM used: 20 seconds (!)
Without rebooting, I exited all applications and tried again: 7 seconds
Normal (not clean) reboot, then wait 10 mins for all services to start and quiesce: 9 seconds first time, 6 after that. (Something’s getting cached?)
Clean boot, then wait 10 mins: 7 seconds first time, 5-6 after that.

So: the clean boot had a noticeable effect, but closing all apps had a vastly more dramatic impact. For some reason the system runs like sludge with a normal non-excessive load, and speeds up a lot if I just exit apps. That’s what really concerns me.

Right now I’m running in the clean boot with 9 apps running, only 3GB of 8GB RAM allocated. Quicken startup is still about 6 sec. BUT if I trigger an alert beep, it takes about 8 seconds for it to play! After a fresh clean boot, with no apps running except a lightweight gvim to trigger the beep, it still takes 4-5 seconds — and it should be instant. So something is still weird even with the clean boot and low load.

So I think I have two separate symptoms here:
* Some things (like playing error beeps) are very slow even immediately after a clean boot.
* The system seems to be extremely sluggish after I’ve been running for just a day or two, with normal reasonable application load.

grichardt01, is Tweaking.com All-in-one likely to help a system that had a complete fresh install just 5-6 weeks ago? It looks like the kind of tool that cleans out bit-rot and crud from long-lived systems. Maybe it could have helped me before I tried the “nondestructive” reinstall, but it seems unlikely to help now.

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I agree with grichardt01 , it’s possible you had a bad install. It can happen, although rare.

This is a totally fresh from-scratch install. This laptop used to perform great when it was new, and I expected it to do well with a fresh install. Any guesses how I might track down the problem??

The only “totally fresh from-scratch install” to me is a genuine MS OS disk with a pre-formatted install, and NOT a manufacturer’s OEM install disk.
Something is not right, I recommend the above if you are indeed using an OEM recover/reinstall disk.

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True, it was not a pure MS install disk. But it was the same OS image that was originally installed on the laptop when it was new, and it worked just fine then… So you’d recommend the All-In-One to clean it up, even though it’s basically a brand-new install?

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