General sluggishness on i5-4200U processor (laptop, windows 10)

Basically I heaved out this laptop from 2013 that had been sitting in my closet for a few years, freshly installed a new Windows 10 on it, threw an SSD in it as well as upgraded it to 12 gb of ram, all this with the support of a generally decent 4th generation i5 processor. Seems pretty good, eh?

Not exactly, productivity on this machine is lackluster. Programs take ages longer to load than they should on a SSD (yes it is sata, but I'm talking really strange load times for a sata SSD), general switching between programs can be annoying with lag, things sometimes just freeze or crash, and the overall feel is just slow (for example, I used the Discord app, and everything is EXTREMELY laggy on it when scrolling, same goes for Skype to a certain extent.

Here's what I've done already to try to fix it: I've....
- reinstalled windows multiple different times
- tried a different SSD (with a confirmed working copy of windows on it already), to no avail
- replaced battery
- tried different ram sticks, re-seated them in different positions
- cleared any dust from the insides

Something to note is that the CPU usage sometimes goes to 100, but even when it's not at 100 these things definitely still apply. Also, why would it even go to 100, that seems way to high especially since CPU temps never really go about 60 from what I've noticed, and ram usage is always at around only 50%. Really nothing makes sense anymore.

Any sort of advice is appreciated. Thank you.

" and ram usage is always at around only 50%"
That is very high, mine is 30% with 8GB RAM on a i5-4200M and a mechanical HDD. Running this Website on IE 11, and Notepad, Task Manager.
Word/Excel files open in less than 1 sec.

It needs servicing. Start with hardware checks and work your way upwards through Windows and Applications. You have done 5 of the 100+ basics required.

Helmut said:

" and ram usage is always at around only 50%"
That is very high, mine is 30% with 8GB RAM on a i5-4200M and a mechanical HDD. Running this Website on IE 11, and Notepad, Task Manager.
Word/Excel files open in less than 1 sec.

It needs servicing. Start with hardware checks and work your way upwards through Windows and Applications. You have done 5 of the 100+ basics required.

I have a lot more running than what you have. Typically I'll have discord, word, onenote, calendar, spotify, notepad, among others. An i5 should be able to handle this especially since my ram usage is not throttling any performance, as well as from experience I've seen i3 processors of the same generation do this.

I'm not sure how else I'm supposed to work my way upwards through Windows and Applications if I've done resets and wipes already; that should have fixed any software issues. I have tested stuff through regedit and changed other services and settings that have been recommended through already documented forums about a similar issue but to no avail.

slicendice said:

You have most likely some post install process still running and optimizing stuff.

Fire up TaskManager.
Go to Details Tab.
Sort all process by CPU-usage (the CPU column) in descending order (arrow pointing down)
Finally take a screenshot of that view and post it here.

Like THIS:


NOTE: You can hide the username column if you want to stay more anonymous. :)

I've noticed that the CPU really goes haywire when doing something like watching a simple youtube video, so here is what this tab looks like with that going.



This is just at idle.

Update: I've looked into the whole System Interrupts thing and I still have had no success... nothing seems to be working honestly, and the signs are more and more pointing to some sort of hardware motherboard issue that would have to be replaced. Meh.

slicendice said:

AHAH, you seem to have some issues with system interrupts...let me see if I can find a tutorial for this here on TenForums.

I'm not sure that is the main issue, because pretty much every application that is running has a really high cpu usage, like chrome will often take like 70% with like 6 tabs open. It seems in general the cpu usage of everything is just amplified.