Pc Slow to boot and intermittent lag

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Hi all.

Short backstory – few months back I bit the bullet and upgraded to Win 10 from 7.

I chose to upgrade rather than a clean install as my Win licence key has an OEM in it.

It worked perfectly, but after a few weeks Windows Update started spitting out an error for their cumulative update creating a booting loop, and simultaneously my pc started lagging and glitching.

After heaps of trial and error I decided to try the Fresh Start option, which worked great (although I had to reinstall some large apps like Photoshop), and all was well for a while, but is giving me grief again.
Boot up is sometimes hideously slow, launching a browser window even after I’ve waited for it to boot completely can take ages to respond, but works well once it’s finally up. At seemingly random times things slow down to the extent my mouse pointer jumps making it hard to get it to where I need it (such as to show the already running task mananger-which invariably shows no major CPU or Memory usage).

Iv’e tried all the same paths as before like Malwarebytes, Spybots, Memtest86, Win diagnostics, DISM ScanHealth – which showed no virus/malware/trojan or any bad ram.

Often, like right now, everything works smoothly. I thought perhaps Kaspersky Cloud was running something in the background so I disabled it’s rootkit scans.

Apps/windows often display Not Responding errors for a few secs and then opening correctly, like something’s taking long to respond.

I’m thinking perhaps it’s a hardware issue? My pc is around 5 or 6 yrs old.

Any suggestions are welcome, I can’t face another Fresh Start.

Cheers,

Anthony

 

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I would fire up Resource Monitor and see what it shows after your machine has been crawling.

1. Open Task Manager.
2. Select the Performance tab.
3. Click “Open Resource Monitor” at the bottom.
4. Close Task Manager.
5. Get on with your work and let us know what happens.

cheers, Paul

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frogant

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[frogant]

Paul T wrote:

1. Open Task Manager.
2. Select the Performance tab.
3. Click “Open Resource Monitor” at the bottom.
4. Close Task Manager.
5. Get on with your work and let us know what happens.

First thing I notice Paul is my CPU Maximum Frequency is running consistently between 98 and 102% -not sure if that’s an issue

CPU usage is low though

• This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by frogant.

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That seems to be CPU throttling. I would expect to see 100% unless you had heat problems or aggressive power management.

cheers, Paul

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frogant

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What are the Disk and Memory stats?

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frogant

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There is an issue with v1903 on some devices and high CPU usage, try this:
Start Button; type services in the search box.
Open Services and locate Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service.
Double-click Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service and select Properties.
Locate Startup type: and change it to Manual if it’s not already set.
Select OK.

now monitor your cpu usage.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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satrow

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I had similar symptoms on a PC and I was told the HDD was on its way out. I replaced it and all was rosy. Whether this is your problem or not I don’t know, I just hope you’ve got a good backup regime – whether the cause is HW or SW.

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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frogant

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frogant wrote:

Pc Slow to boot and intermittent lag

How is your wi-fi/network speed ? It could be a network problem.

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frogant

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Hi Alex, I use LTE wifi which is quite fast, though I don’t think it would impact on system windows (Explorer) lagging on open.

The problem exists whether I’m connected to the internet or not.

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satrow wrote:

What are the Disk and Memory stats?

That actually is quite interesting Satrow – I noticed that copying files to an external or 2nd drive (for back-up) jumps around wildly between 40kb/sec and 24mb\sec, but mostly is very slow.

Resource Monitor shows my Disk running between 40 and 1200kb /sec, while it’s highest active time is at 100%, this possibly reflects Windows Explorer being very slow and sometimes flashing Not Responding for a bit before continuing.

I don’t know what Hard Faults are but in Memory the number jumps around a bit, the highest Iv’e noticed is 32 – Used Physical Memory is at 26% (I’m sure it was around 38% at some point yesterday)

 

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frogant wrote:

That actually is quite interesting Satrow – I noticed that copying files to an external or 2nd drive (for back-up) jumps around wildly between 40kb/sec and 24mb\sec, but mostly is very slow.

Resource Monitor shows my Disk running between 40 and 1200kb /sec, while it’s highest active time is at 100%, this possibly reflects Windows Explorer being very slow

Well, right. External drive gets peak speeds of 24 megs/sec. Internal drive tops out at 1200 k/sec so 1.2 megs/sec … and a copy-out process can’t write out more than it’s gotten in, so average overall copy speed being read-limited is possible.

access-mdb wrote:

I had similar symptoms on a PC and I was told the HDD was on its way out. I replaced it and all was rosy. Whether this is your problem or not I don’t know, I just hope you’ve got a good backup regime – whether the cause is HW or SW.

Would be consistent with that at least.

There’s an age-related failure mode or two that are known to produce gradually increasing seek delays on spinning HDDs, for both reads and writes – and some models of SSDs have shown delays too with a much steeper curve, as their first symptom.

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frogant

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mn– wrote:

There’s an age-related failure mode or two that are known to produce gradually increasing seek delays on spinning HDDs, for both reads and writes – and some models of SSDs have shown delays too with a much steeper curve, as their first symptom.

That makes my reasoning to get an SSD as replacement a bit more shaky lol. Although perhaps a steeper curve would mean a faster diagnosis.

Thanks so much for your help, it is truly appreciated.

Now to look for a new HD…

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frogant wrote:

mn– wrote:

There’s an age-related failure mode or two that are known to produce gradually increasing seek delays on spinning HDDs, for both reads and writes – and some models of SSDs have shown delays too with a much steeper curve, as their first symptom.

That makes my reasoning to get an SSD as replacement a bit more shaky lol. Although perhaps a steeper curve would mean a faster diagnosis.

Thanks so much for your help, it is truly appreciated.

Now to look for a new HD…

Any SSD you buy today will most likely outlive the useful life of the computer you’re putting it into, assuming you’re not writing 1x your total drive capacity on a daily basis.

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frogant

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Have you used the StartUp tab in Task Manager to check and disable unneeded startup items?

Do you have any network shares defined that are not available when the PC starts?

Have you run Disk Cleanup or Storage Sense?

If you are running an HDD have you run any defragmenter?

--Joe

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frogant

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joep517 wrote:

Have you used the StartUp tab in Task Manager to check and disable unneeded startup items?

Do you have any network shares defined that are not available when the PC starts?

Have you run Disk Cleanup or Storage Sense?

If you are running an HDD have you run any defragmenter?

Yes, the first thing I do after updating/upgrading my OS is always to kill startup processes I don’t want starting until I want to use them, that and removing as much bloatware as I can.

I haven’t used Disk Cleanup, or Storage Sense(which is new to me) but I use Ccleaner (and more recently Glary Utilities) regulary. I have heaps of space, Iv’e only used a quarter of my 1TB HD, but yes I have defragmented the drive – probably 5 months back (for the first time) .

joep517 wrote:

Have you used the StartUp tab in Task Manager to check and disable unneeded startup items?

Do you have any network shares defined that are not available when the PC starts?

Have you run Disk Cleanup or Storage Sense?

If you are running an HDD have you run any defragmenter?

Sorry, I don’t quite understand what you mean ‘network shares defined’.

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If you don’t understand “network shares” then you probably don’t have them.

The reason to run Disk Cleanup (Control Panel) or Storage Sense (Settings | System | Storage) is to clean up the Windows Update WinSXS folder that accumulates lots of files especially after cumulative updates are run.

BTW, I would always use the built-in utilities before any third-party programs for this kind of cleanup. Both Ccleaner and Glary have gotten more complex over the years. They are trying to be all things to all people. I know many people swear by them but I only use them if I can’t get a system cleaned up using built-in apps/programs.

--Joe

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cmptrgy, frogant, RockE

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joep517 wrote:

If you don’t understand “network shares” then you probably don’t have them.

The reason to run Disk Cleanup (Control Panel) or Storage Sense (Settings | System | Storage) is to clean up the Windows Update WinSXS folder that accumulates lots of files especially after cumulative updates are run.

BTW, I would always use the built-in utilities before any third-party programs for this kind of cleanup. Both Ccleaner and Glary have gotten more complex over the years. They are trying to be all things to all people. I know many people swear by them but I only use them if I can’t get a system cleaned up using built-in apps/programs.

Good to know, thank you.

joep517 wrote:

BTW, I would always use the built-in utilities before any third-party programs for this kind of cleanup. Both Ccleaner and Glary have gotten more complex over the years. They are trying to be all things to all people. I know many people swear by them but I only use them if I can’t get a system cleaned up using built-in apps/programs.

I hear you, programs like Ccleaner and Glary and so many AV programs that Iv’e tried can take so much work make do the one thing alone that you need from them – I think your way is probably better also in terms of privacy and safety. So thanks for that.

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frogant wrote:

1TB HD, but yes I have defragmented the drive – probably 5 months back (for the first time)

By default, Windows 10 should be defragmenting your HD weekly (although that can be changed to daily or monthly). But five months seems like a long time to go without checking that it’s happening:

Defragment your Windows 10 PC

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frogant

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Fragmentation can significantly slow performance, sometimes even after just a few minutes with operations like security scans and monitoring, telemetry, background updates, large web pages, restore shadowing, and many other system functions going on. This has greatly increased with Win10 versus Win7. It sometimes doesn’t take much fragmentation or time to slow a machine. A graphical defragger like Diskeeper or Defraggler that you can run manually will give you a visual colorful representation of what is happening on your hard drive, along with the Resource Monitor giving you awareness of what is running and using various shown resources.

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frogant

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Your problem is Meltdown and Spectre security patches…I had to fix multiple computers with those patches enabled… Download Inspectre and disable/turn off both Meltdown and Spectre as needed. You will see a big increase in speed and the computer should be running a lot better.
https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

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frogant

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I would upgrade to an SSD. I think that Windows 10 performs much better on them.

I upgraded a desktop (Win 7) and laptop (Win 8.1) to Windows 10.

The desktop has an SSD and is a very good performer, while the laptop with a 5400RPM HDD lags quite a bit, even though it has a generation newer Intel CPU and chipset than the desktop. Win 8.1 on this laptop didn’t seem to exhibit this behavior that I can recall.

The laptop always has disk usage pegged at 100% for a while after boot, and periodically during the day when a Windows background task runs. Observations made using Task Manager and Resource Monitor. CPU load is usually minimal and memory use is also low. It is obvious that whenever this happens the disk is maxed out.

I have tried optimizing the laptop and eliminating as many startup programs and scheduled tasks as possible. Yet still …

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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JohnW wrote:

I would upgrade to an SSD. I think that Windows 10 performs much better on them.

I upgraded a desktop (Win 7) and laptop (Win 8.1) to Windows 10.

The desktop has an SSD and is a very good performer, while the laptop with a 5400RPM HDD lags quite a bit, even though it has a generation newer Intel CPU and chipset than the desktop. Win 8.1 on this laptop didn’t seem to exhibit this behavior that I can recall.

The laptop always has disk usage pegged at 100% for a while after boot, and periodically during the day when a Windows background task runs. Observations made using Task Manager and Resource Monitor. CPU load is usually minimal and memory use is also low. It is obvious that whenever this happens the disk is maxed out.

I have tried optimizing the laptop and eliminating as many startup programs and scheduled tasks as possible. Yet still …

Exactly what I did. My SSD arrived today, figuring out how to clone it and change the boot order took like an hour – und voila!

I am very happy with the SSD, works really well, fast.

Strangley, my HHD seems to be working quite well….thinking I’ll format it and use it to mess around with Linux or something similar.

Thanks for all your help!

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JohnW

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Glad that you got it working well again!

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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frogant

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