Laptop woes

Oriental Slave · 26 Mar 2016

My laptop suddenly started going mega-slow on Wednesday afternoon. It behaves in normal mode as if it has a memory leak.

It doesn't happen in safe mode, but if I start in safe mode with network the network doesn't start.
I've run sfc /scannow which brings up that it can't replace opencl.dll
I've also tried dicm (or is it dcim?) with an image on a DVD and that hasn't fixed it either.

A virus seems highly unlikely as I've not used it for anything I've used the desktop for, ditto with visiting websites, and receiving / opening email.

Advice? Right now the only way I see of fixing it is to backup my files (luckily there are not many of them) and reset W10, which I guess means I'll have to reinstall the software.

Night Hawk · 26 Mar 2016

You could try the inplace upgrade to repair option to avoid the down time of reinstalling everything fresh or perhaps a simple use of the System Restore option in case something you just saw go on lately is the source of the problems? A System restore point can save a whole lot of down time trying to debug a problem just now being seen! System Restore Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

I would recommend giving that a try first before simply jumping into a last resort option since this is only in the last few days time.

Oriental Slave · 26 Mar 2016

Thanks, I will look into that.

I should add that when I was trying to look at this it looks remarkably like it started system maintenance at pretty much the time the go-slow started.

dalchina · 26 Mar 2016

opencl.dll being reported by SFC /scannow is an MS bug, which in 'News' is supposed to be fixed 'soon' - been there for months.
If nothing else is reported, fine.

You could try a clean boot and try to work out what's running that's causing this, unless it's a scheduled task.
Clean Boot - Perform in Windows 10 to Troubleshoot Software Conflicts - Windows 10 Forums

Also post a screenshot of your task manager organised by highest CPU use topmost, highest disk use topmost.

Oriental Slave · 26 Mar 2016

Clean boot looks a good idea to me.

Night Hawk · 26 Mar 2016

Actually the blame by MVPs and others at the TechNet site goes to... NVidia gaming compatible drivers! If your laptop is an older model that previously 8.1 you could try replacing the present driver seeing it removed first with the 8.1 update from the NVidia support pages. One post with several entries at TechNet can be looked over at Windows 10 opencl.dll Error

Oriental Slave · 26 Mar 2016

Night Hawk said:

Actually the blame by MVPs and others at the TechNet site goes to... NVidia gaming compatible drivers! If your laptop is an older model that previously 8.1 you could try replacing the present driver seeing it removed first with the 8.1 update from the NVidia support pages. One post with several entries at TechNet can be looked over at Windows 10 opencl.dll Error

This is presumably for the opencl.dll issue?

Night Hawk · 26 Mar 2016

That's what the discussion there pertained to. The error isn't that uncommon. The SFC tool wasn't the answer as you found out while some pointed to the "sfc /scannow" command on a few of the threads seen. That one was linked from another!

Since there was some indication in a few about errors in the registry being seen the System Restore option had been the item there of interest. Rolling things back a few days before you first noticed things weren't running as they should might be the solution as well as the quick fix without the need for further action like a repair or reset.

Oriental Slave · 26 Mar 2016

I was going to say there is an awful lot of disk activity even after a clean boot whereas on my desktop which is fine there is none. The culprits are Service Host: Local System (Network Restricted) which has 11 associated processes **, System and compressed memory**. However it seems to have settled down now so I'll work my way through the trouble-shooting in the article posted about clean boot.

**edit - these processes use an awful lot of disk for some time after booting. I'm also seeing some other Service Host processes using a lot of HDD.

Night Hawk · 26 Mar 2016

The one thing I do not like about how 10 deals with the Startup tab in the Task manager having seen that moved out of the original msconfig utility was the Selective startup and check box for being able to disable all 3rd party startups along with selectively knocking out 3rd party services. That was an effective way to isolate a problem when you don't know exactly which ones to knock out. You simply enabled them back one at a time until the culprits were found.

Now you can still see all that disabled but spent quite a bit more time going down through the list of things! The other thing that also comes to mind when mentioning disk activity levels would be scheduling a run of the Disk Check tool on the next start up! Once you right click on the Start button and select the Command prompt(admin) option for the elevated permissions you then simply type the "chkdsk /r/f" command with the two R=Repair and F=Fix switches tacked on. That came in handy back in 2012 when the 7/8 CP dual boot turned into a mess and got each version running again!