Win 10 sometimes very sluiggish, other times very quick.

This is not either of the computers in my profile so here's some specs

HP Compaq 8300 Elite
RAM 16GB
System Drive C: Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA HDD
Data Drive D: Seagate Barracuda 500 GB SATA Hard Drive
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit 22H2

A large part of the time, this computer operates quickly and well. A couple of seconds to open Firefox or Chrome to the home page. Programs such as Open Office, ACDSee, Photoshop and Acrobat Reader open quickly, within a few seconds... no more than five. It will operate like this for hours on end, then suddenly, its like its got a bear on its back. Programs start taking 45-90 seconds to open - CTRL-Shift-Esc to takes up to a minute or more to open the task manager.

The task manager shows nothing excessive going on - CPU, Memory and Disk are all low values, and Network shows nothing significant either. This state of affairs can remain for anything from 10 minutes to an hour, then just as quickly as it began, it ends... normal service resumed.

I have checked the task scheduler to see if there are any strange tasks running
I have tried running with the task manager always open, and sitting on the task bar but when the problem happens it takes a few seconds after I click on it to pop up, and when it does it remains blank for a few seconds. I was wondering if I might have a dying HDD, except that I haven't experienced any of the sort of stuff associated with a drive on the way out, such as overheating, crashes, BSODs, boot fails or data loss.

As you can imagine, it is very frustrating to have a machine that is running like a greyhound until all of a sudden, it turns into a sloth.

You can check the disk's health with Hard Disk Sentinel or similar utility. If the disk is OK (100% health) and not that old, maybe Windows Update downloads stuff in the background consuming resources and slowing down the system. I would also check for malware with Superantispyware or Malwarebytes Antimalware and remove all findings.

idgat said:

Step 1 - replace the HDDs with SSDs. Maybe even just 1 SSD for system, leave the other HDD, at a pinch

I wouldn't waste my time checking anything else until this is done

EDIT Oh yeh, and a clean install. Don't waste your time cloning or imaging a possible buggy system onto a new drive. Defeats the purose.

Thanks for the advice, and I may eventually be forced to do a clean install, but that has always been a last resort for me, not the first step. There are seven computers where I am at the moment. if did drive change and clean install every time I had a computer glitch, I would doing clean clean installs to new SSDs several times a month. Clean install on these machines is a massive amount of work, and not something I am prepared to do unless absolutely necessary. I'd sooner use a bit of my own time troubleshooting first.

- - - Updated - - -

spapakons said:

You can check the disk's health with Hard Disk Sentinel or similar utility. If the disk is OK (100% health) and not that old, maybe Windows Update downloads stuff in the background consuming resources and slowing down the system. I would also check for malware with Superantispyware or Malwarebytes Antimalware and remove all findings.

Paul Black said:

Hello @smartcooky,

As a start, with the aim to reduce trouble-shooting, please perform the following.

• Hard Disk Sentinel [ DISK - Also OK for SSD's ] > Hard Disk Sentinel - Portable Trial Version Available

 Hard Disk Sentinel

You can run it directly from a USB, and in my opinion, this gives the best INSTANT report available compared to other software of the same type.




If that reports to be OK, then we can go from there with things like sfc etc..

I hope this helps.

OK, I have downloaded Hard Disk Sentinel portable version onto a USB drive, and I will take that in first thing tomorrow to do some testing.

For a system with tens of applications and many GB of data taking a full backup and reinstall everything can easily take a week or more. In such system I recommend cloning the disk and upgrade the applications as necessary. The clean installation is reserved as a last resort when there is a big unsolvable issue in the current system which could take more time to troubleshoot and fix it.

Paul Black said:

As a start, with the aim to reduce trouble-shooting, please perform the following.

• Hard Disk Sentinel [ DISK - Also OK for SSD's ] > Hard Disk Sentinel - Portable Trial Version Available

 Hard Disk Sentinel

You can run it directly from a USB, and in my opinion, this gives the best INSTANT report available compared to other software of the same type.

If that reports to be OK, then we can go from there with things like sfc etc..

OK, so here are some screencaps from Hard Disk Sentinel







I can't see anything untoward here. Health is only 90% due to some bad sectors (this might indicate a drive change could be a good idea sometime soon) but 10 bad sectors on a 250GB drive with 100 GB of unused space is hardly cause for panic. Also, the C: drive is almost exclusively used only for running the OP and running installed programs. The user folders have all been relocated to the Data Drive D:, no data from Photoshop, Open Office, ACDSee or any other programs is kept in C drive at all.

About the next step you mention, I run SFC /scannow and DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth every Monday via a batch file using Task Scheduler.

zinou said:

Hi,

When your system starts being sluggish, use Windows Performance Recorder to record a trace so that we can analyze it.
Here is a similar thread for the steps to follow to record a trace:
Win 10 started to get very sluggish and takes a while to do anything

OK, I have installed that, and put a shortcut on the top-right of the desktop for quick easy access. No sluggishness was observed today.