Huge breakthrough. I disabled my Avast antivirus protection and now everything is loading like it should. 7zip works instantly, exe files load like they should, and everything else is good.
I did have one panic moment with my ram, when I noticed that the percentage used was much higher than it was normally...till I remember that I'm running on half the amount of ram that I usually am.
I'm going to try uninstalling and reinstalling avast and see if that fixes the issue.
From the looks of it, Avast may be the culprit here. I reinstalled it and everything loads ultra slowly now until I disable the shields. I'm gonna go check avast forums to see if anyone else is having this issue, then I'll go ahead and reassemble my computer.
Uninstalled Avast, installed AVG...everything is running as it should.
Hi there
With Windows defender in W10 you don't really need ANY AV software -- you can use though Malwarebytes to scan perioedically for malware and PUPS.
3rd party AV software often - apart from these days being largely irrelevant (Windows built in system is as good (or as bad depending on your point of view) as any thing else.
Probably monitoring HDD activity also would lead you to get to the culprit. A lot of poor system performance these days is often down to excessive / poor I/O (particularly HDD's) - if you have excessive HDD I/O it's then a simple matter usually to find out what's causing it and remedy the problem.
Having the OS on an SSD these days will pay huge dividends in performance too -- even on OLD machines.
Cheers
jimbo
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