General Sluggishness on New Laptop

Okay so a little background, I've had multiple windows laptops in the past couple years, and I've had the SAME problem among all of them that I use. I also have a desktop with Windows 10 on it that does not show these symptoms.

The main couple of things I notice that shows this sluggishness is first the task switching via ALT + TAB. When I first restart the laptop (now I recently bought an Acer Aspire E 15 E5-576G-5762 and am currently using it) or when I restart explorer.exe in task manager, everything is fine and great and the alt tabbing works super quick. As time goes on however, it just gets progressively slower and I can feel it.

Also, a couple of programs are just noticeably slow always, such as Discord, where the scrolling is just really laggy and hard to navigate, and often times chrome.

My two things I think may be the problem is the ram (I have 16gb and it never goes above 8 so like I'm not sure why that would cause any issues, I've removed 1 stick and tried just 8gb and got the same result) as well as using a different ISO of windows. Sometimes in the past reinstalling a new ISO of windows would help but EVENTUALLY it would go back to how it is acting right now.

It has been plaguing me for years and I can't figure out why. It has to be a software issue. Any ideas?

dalchina said:

Hi, just hints to point you in the right direction:

Check for any excessive resource usage when you note sluggishness (CPU, DISK) - would assume you've probably done that.

Tools you may consider using are
a. LatencyMon by Resplendence (free)
b. Windows Performance Recorder
(Downloadable MS tool)
Download and Install Windows Performance Toolkit in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials
c. Driver Verifier
Enable and Disable Driver Verifier in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

An example thread (you can find more):
Suddenly, everything loads slowly - Windows 10 Forums

Yeah there is no excessive use of any hardware piece in task manager. I'll try some of the programs you recommended and get back with you. I've checked multiple threads with issues that may resemble my problem, but nothing the same especially considering I've had this across all of my laptops in the past like 2 years.

dalchina said:

Unfortunate. I've had Win 10 on this without any clean installs from first public release (it was clean installed) - no special problems. But I've not upgraded beyond 1709 (by choice) .... yet....


Has this been the case, for example, since they were upgraded to Win 10 - assuming that's so?

Are all your laptops identical? Do you have any common programs installed that might be linked to this?

How are they
a. After a clean boot
b. In Safe Mode
c. When using a live boot disk such as Kyhi's Win 10 disk, available from the top of the Software and Apps section
d. If you create a new user and log in as that user

Have you checked disk benchmark figures?
Presumably there isn't a paging problem as you say there's no excessive CPU or disk usage.

All the laptops I've had are different, a couple Dells and now an Acer. I thought that maybe it was just because the Dell laptops had a 4th gen processor and was just sorta not keeping up to speed with the stuff I was doing (even though it should be able to), and got this Acer that has an 8th gen with 4 cores.

It has been the case since I started using Windows 10 basically, and I did use all the same programs for them. I don't think that should be the problem though since I have a desktop computer that also has all the same programs and has NEVER had this issue no matter how long I let it run or how long it has gone without sleeping; it always runs at a great quick speed and it's not overpowered.

After restarting it, everything seems fine at first but just slowly declines in performance over the hours, then the next day it is noticeably slower than it should be. I haven't really tried safe mode, but I'm not really sure why it would be a driver issue but I'll give it a try. I'll take a look at that Kyhi's win10 Disk as well, I haven't heard of that before as well as try a new user, that's a good point that I haven't thought about.

In terms of the disk, I don't think that would be the problem either considering I've used an SSD for all of them, and even this laptop I'm using now is a brand new NVME SSD, and task manager never shows it getting very high at all.

Ztruker said:

What are the specs for the Laptop? How much ram? SSD drive or Spinner?
What does Task Manager look like, CPU, Hard Drive, RAM?
What AV software?
What other software have you installed?

i5 8th gen
NVIDIA MX150 Graphics chip
16gb ram (upgraded from 8gb)
256gb M.2 SSD with 512gb SATA SSD as backup with some programs and files on it

This is what task manager looks like on an average basis (https://i.imgur.com/v8N6iDx.png)

I just use Windows Defender for AV\

I have lots of other software installed, such as Adobe products, full Office, stuff for my school, Discord, Streaming applications and Steam games, etc.

dalchina said:

You really need to work through the ideas above using each one to try to identify the cause.
If your laptop has a SSD you can turn off fast startup (not really needed).

Please complete specs on a sample laptop (see mine for comparison).

Without something hard to go on, it's just a guessing game.

So I've tested the above ideas, and nothing seems to have changed, except maybe the safe mode boot helped the speed. It's hard to tell really since it can take days for the laptop to show severe slowdown, but safe mod seemed to have made it work as I would expect with the given specs. Aside from that, nothing seems to show any promise unfortunately.

I downloaded a driver verification tool as well and made sure everything was updated but no noticeable difference.