Hard Drive speed plummets for no reason.

I would try disconnecting one hard drive at a time, leaving the others running and see if one is causing the problem. If one is possibly having read errors it could slow down everything while the system is trying to read it.

Ran crystaldiskinfo and it said that the oldest drive in my computer was showing caution, so I got everything running good again, then pulled the drive. It takes about an hr from when I start it up to when performance degrades, so I'll be able to see if this drive is the culprit.

The plot thickens. It doesn't appear to be an issue with the hard drives after all, but the applications. Using Windows native apps allows the files to open right away, using other apps causes the slowdown after an hour or so.


After an hr, Irfanview opens pics slow. Windows photo viewer works right away


I uninstalled VLC and Media Player Classic, as they already were seeming to take awhile, but Windows Media Player works just fine.


Even 7zip is running slow, whereas opening archives through Windows Explorer works right away.


No idea why this started happening, and no idea why this is temporarily fixed by reinstalling motherboard drivers. I'm going to install the drivers one at a time and see which one actually does the fixing...then I'll try to go from there.

I reinstalled/repaired the Intel Management Engine Components, and that seemed to be the temporary fix. Except that I reinstalled VLC and MPC and those still load slow in comparison to Windows Media Player, but everything else works just fine...for now. Irfanview and 7zip work like they should.

Another thing I should probably point out is that the folders themselves load up just fine, and that once the programs are loaded up, then they run normally, and are able to browse files regularly. If I close the program, then I'll have to relaunch it to get the performance back.

Thought I'd go ahead and toss out another little update here. Ran memtest for 2 hours, got 46 errors, but they were all test 13 errors, which is the Hammer Test. From some studying I've done, it seems that failing the Hammer Test isn't a guarantee of failure in the ram. Also, when I set the test to use the full eight cores of my cpu, my ram passed the Hammer Test. After I wake up, I'm going to remove one of the two ram sticks and run the test again. See what happens.

Hi there

Try Monitoring with HWINFO HWiNFO, HWiNFO32 HWiNFO64 - Hardware Information, Analysis and Monitoring Tools

Also you can report to a file I've set mine to write to a log file every 5 Mins and you can decide what info to take.



Cheers
jimbo

Well, I'm doing the ram tests now. I removed one stick and the problem remained, so I changed the sticks and it seems to be better for now. Of course, it was fine earlier...but VLC still loaded slower when it was working and it's loading pretty fast now. I'll give it an hour to see if the problem does indeed lie with the ram. Still, if that doesn't work, then I'll try your item. Thanks.

So when I monitor, what is it that I'm looking for? I'm starting to think that this might not work, since 7 Zip is still taking longer than it should, and programs seem like they are taking longer to launch than they should.