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Mysterious System Slowdown
I'm posting this on behalf of my old friend and colleague, Herb Martin, who used to teach Windows NT desktop and server curriculum at his company LearnQuick.com back in the day when I was first getting into that same area (which puts it around 1994-1995). He still works with Windows every day, but primarily on the Server side of things. He's having some mysterious performance issues best described as "chronic and persistent system lag/slow response" on an HP Envy laptop with a Haswell i5, 4 GB RAM, and a 500 GB conventional HD. He's looking for ideas on things to check and look out for to try to improve system performance.
In checking Task Manager, Process Explorer, and even Resource Monitor, he's not seeing any obvious standouts that could be sucking up large amounts of resources. That said, he is likely to have half-a-dozen applications open at the same time, including two different Web browsers, each with 10 or more open tabs, plus a development platform, a code editor (like NotePad++), and one or two other tools.
He's inclined to think that context switching among the many open processes is involved in this lag, but neither he nor I know of any effective ways to get a handle on that through performance monitoring. My only thought is to keep an eye on paging activity and working set size, both of which much surely be stressed in this kind of computing situation. I also told him to keep an eye on Reliability Monitor and Event Viewer since these two facilities are particularly able and informative when it comes to catching and diagnosing hardware-related issues.
All this said, here's my appeal to the community: what else would you folks suggest that Herb do to try to speed things up? He's already planning to buy a new and presumably more capable laptop later this year, so he doesn't want to buy an SSD or add more memory to sink older, more expensive parts into an older machine, just to turn around and spend more money on that new laptop shortly thereafter.
All suggestions, ideas, and advice welcome. Thanks!
--Ed--
Last edited by EdTittel; 04 Apr 2018 at 11:57. Reason: Fix typo: Even --> Event