I need help diagnosing a suddenly sluggish stuttering Win 10 install

Hi All,

I started my back up Win 10 PC tonite to do any last updates before I put in in the closet and It started up oddly and is very sluggish now. It did do a few updates, and each time, I walked back into the room to a black screen. It seemed stuck there. I tapped the mouse and it returned to a update screen. It also seems jittery, and the 3D screensaver now jerks around in a circle, rather than in the normal smooth flowing way. One time it was actually stopped, than it slowly started jittering around. In know something is wrong and I need to correct it . But being a backup PC would just resetting and starting from scratch be easier.

Looking for some suggestions

Recently one of my machines became intermittently sluggish, sometimes taking an inordinate time to boot. Backups were taking far longer than usual too. Turned out that the HDD was failing.

Check your drive's SMART data with something like CrystalDiskInfo. I use the Portable App version:

CrystalDiskInfo Portable (disk health monitoring) | PortableApps.com

My HDD had (at first) 300 reallocated sectors. With a few more hours of use that number had increased to over 1500 (a sure sign of a failing drive). Fortunately it had not (yet) deteriorated so far that it became corrupted. I managed (just) to make a Macrium image of the system. Restoring that to a replacement drive sorted out the 'slugish' behaviour.

I guess I did not present enough info first. I just replaced the failing OEM HDD with an Samsung EVO SDD and did a Win 10 upgrade on a win 7 machine. I Installed all my apps, and It is now the backup to the new windows 10 machine that replaced it. I was just going to do one last run with it before I put it away, but the odd behavior makes we me need to fix it first .

How many updates was it doing as it can take a long time if its big updates there has been lots in the last few weeks having a 3d screen saver wont help as it tends to slow to a crawl if the cpu is in use as it thinks your working

It is still acting the same way as earlier. All updates are done and it has been restarted a couple times too. It is just idling now, and when hitting the mouse the screensaver turns full black and in a couple seconds it wakes up to the desktop. My impression upon initially starting it tonite was like maybe it was trying to finish an update from last time it was run. Just slow and groggy.

Have you used the samsung util for the drive as it may need a firware update or other setting which it will do for you

Ok, Can you explain how to access the utility?

- - - Updated - - -

I downloaded magician, and it did do a firmware update. I wanted to run or schedule the optimization tool, but it said it was not available. Any possible reason why it may not be able to run on this PC?

As I understood, you had Win 7, updated to Win 10 and your issue began.
Did you looked for missing drivers on Device manager?

If I were you I would do a Clean Install Windows 10
- Save all your data on an external disk.
- Boot from Win 10 installation disk (DVD or USB flash)
- Go to install, delete ALL partitions and proceed.
- Skip to enter the key.
- When done, retrieve your data.

I know that it sound radical, but there is nothing like a Clean install, specially after upgrading from Win 7 or Win 8.x

Would I need to buy a Win 10 Copy to do this? Not sure how to get on it on a disk or thumb from an upgrade. I would like to keep that available for future use if it became necessary in the future.

No, you don't need to buy a Win 10 license or disk.
You can download Win 10 from M$ in two ways.

Download Windows 10
- Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool

As I wrote before, skip entering the key. It will activate as the computer had Win 10 before.