Poor performance but very low hardware usage

Hi everbody,

I came here after leaving my PC in a couple of repairment stores and not finding a solution for a problem that has been drowning my vital energy for the past month. Before everything, I'll post my specs and how my PC is configured:

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• CPU: Intel i5-6600K @3.50GHz
• Memory: 16GB DDR4
• GPU: NVIDIA GIGABYTE RTX1070
• Disks: 2 SSDs (one for W10 OS, other for Unix OS) + 2 HDDs
• OS: Windows 10 Home + Linux Mint 20 / Dual Boot
• W10 Version: What winver says: Version 1909 (SO compilation 18363.1237), what system information says: Version 10.0.18363

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I might not have the best PC out there, but it was great enough when I assembled it (4 years ago, it is neither not that old). Moreover, it didn't showed a problem like this ever, it has always behaved so well. Sadly, one day weeks ago, my Windows 10 OS (I do also have Linux on dual boot) started to misbehave, becoming so laggy and slow.

First of all, I thought it could be a virus, so I scanned with Kaspersky Total Security the full system and disks but no malware was detected. The next step I followed was doing the backup of the sensitive data located at the Windows SSD, and reinstalling it from scratch. Surprisingly, this step didn't solve the problem, and the fresh installed Windows 10 continued performing so slow.

However, the Windows installation smashed the BIOS UEFI entries and I lost access to the Linux OS, which I also had to reinstall. When I did that, I've entered in Linux and saw that it was performing as always, so I assumed (don't know if correctly) that it couldn't be a hardware problem, since all the components that supply Windows also supply Linux. Since you would be asking for it, it couldn't also be the SSDs: when I reinstalled both OS, I changed them: W10 where Linux were and viceversa.

We might be reaching the current state of my problem: I have a fresh Windows 10 unusable that can't be reinstalled again (because I could lose again the boot to the Linux system, and it was shown that reinstalling Windows doesn't solve anything). The problem isn't also related to CPU/GPU/disk/memory usage, since those values doesn't get higher than 20% / 10% / 10% / 25%, respectively (might the problem be that those values can't go higher even though they should?). A proof of it is this a benchmark I run yesterday, that said that my PC is worse than 99% of the ones that had been scanned with PCMark10 tool, which is surreal. During that benchmark, none of the specs worked much higher than the limits I've said before.

To sum up, it (appearently) seems not to be a hardware issue, since Linux works perfectly, but a Windows 10 problem that survives a fresh reinstallation ( ). I know I didn't provide much information apart from the low usage and my PC configuration, but I'll be alert to this post and provide anything you require in order to troubleshoot this problem; perfmon, more benchmarking, whatever is needed.

Thank you so much to everybody that could help me.

Hi! Thanks for answering :)

dalchina said:

Hi, did this start after a Win 10 upgrade?

Well, until this problem happened I wasn't really concerned about Win 10 upgrades and when they where happening, but I assume that it happened after October update, probably.

dalchina said:

Please check your disk transfer rate e.g. by copying a large file back to the same disk, and observing the Performance tab for that disk with the task manager and the rate shown on the file explorer- related window. If your transfer rate is limited to less than, say, 10MB/s and disk usage is 100%, that would fit.

If I understood well, I had created a 2GB dummy file on the Windows 10 SSD, and performed various operations with that: copying itself into the same SSD, moving to one of the HDDs, moving it back to the SSD again, etc. All the operations performed correctly (+500MB/s) and the disk usage didn't went higher than 20%.

dalchina said:

In a recent thread, very limited performance was due to the use of multiple types of 3rd party security programs. Please confirm this is not so in your case.

The problem with this is that a fresh installation of Windows 10 is still performing slow even though there is no 3rd party program installed (I've said that I've used Kaspersky to scan but now it is (almost, i.e. drivers) completely fresh).

dalchina said:

You've just done a clean install - was that with 20H2??
Your original build was 1909.
Therefore it sounds as if the problem deveoped whilst using 1909- is that correct?

Well, I'll need to explain this: I've reinstalled completely fresh Windows 10 before, when I'd lost the access to Linux, but after that, the problem didn't solve. And I'm 99% confident that before and after that reinstallation, the version was 20H2.
Since I wanted to try again, but without losing the boot for my Linux system, I tried to select the Windows option "Reset this PC" choosing "Delete all data" (since the sensitive and personal data is stored into the HDDs, I had no problem on completely wipe the SSD). That is my current state, and I don't know why the version is 1909 and not 20H2, but on Windows update screen it says I'm up-to-date.

dalchina said:

Before discarding the disk transfer rate issue, note the transfer rate shown here as I mentioned:

This is the task manager screenshot at the point when I performed the copy operations (the peak only lasted the few seconds the operation needed). I saw <20% because I wasn't looking to the exact disk being used, don't know if those numbers are normal or not:

dalchina said:

In what way is your PC slow?

I might be an average-user of Windows (so I am), but I only use Windows for gaming and spending time on the Internet, whereas Linux is my system for working. So the main things I'd noticed about this "lag" is: low FPS on every single game (from 144 to less than 20 in almost any of them), applications such as Firefox or Discord lagging and showing delay on every action, etc. Don't know if that provides helpful information but I don't really use the Windows system for other purposes. The benchmark I've posted in the first one might be the main proof of the laggyness of the system.

dalchina said:

It would be interesting to see what this says about your PC:
Get Windows Experience Index (WEI) Score in Windows 10

This is my result of WEI Score:

dalchina said:

As an experiment, try the Ultimate power plan.
Add or Remove Ultimate Performance Power Plan in Windows 10

I've tested this and I have to say that I've noticed a very sligthly upgrade, but I'll run another benchmark now and check if it's significant or not.

dalchina said:

I assume you've not been offered an upgrade by WU from 1909- is that correct?
I further assume your installation medium is one you've had since 2019- is that correct?

It's kinda strange what happened. First of all, I'll let clear the history of versions: I assume I had the previous version to 20H2 before October, and I had 20H2 when the "lag" showed up. I'm almost sure about that. After reinstalling with installation medium, I also had 20H2 on the fresh Windows that was also lagging.

Yesterday I "reinstalled" Windows through "Reset this PC" option, which maybe didn't reinstall Windows 100% but does some kind of factory reset: that's where version 1909 appeared, not from any installation medium. After that reset, I checked Windows Update and installed all the updates I got prompted, but none 20H2 showed. Now, I chose to manually check for updates and I could choose 20H2, so I'm currently installing it in order to have an stable environment.

dalchina said:

What you could do is pull that card out or disable it, then boot your PC so it is not using the Nvidia card at all, then try using Firefox.

Since my computer was made by pieces, I don't really know if it has an integrated graphic card to use if I disable or remove the PCI card. Could I try to install the previous driver to the one that the slowness was related at or is it impossible to downgrade that?

Okey, since the last post I'd written I've been downloading 20H2, since I live in a small village and my Internet connection is poor. But if you tell me it's not the preferable version to be working at, should I stay on 1909 or download another build?

My next steps were: installing 20H2 (now tell me if I should stay on 1909 or go to another), updating the BIOS (I've seen it was pretty much outdated), and then going to Nvidia.

- - - Updated - - -

I have just updated the BIOS and I've seen that the speed of the CPU was like "locked", it said: "CPU SPEED: 0.80GHz". Don't know if that was the "current" speed or whatever, but it felt strange.

Moreover, I checked into the task manager and I've seen that speed is locked at 0.77GHz even with 0% or 20% usage (won't go more than that).

UPDATE: before updating BIOS, the "0.77 lock" also was what the task manager shown.