Windows 10 Pro running abnormally slow on Lenovo T420

Greetings everyone,

I am running Windows 10 Pro for almost 2 months now on my Lenovo T420 laptop. It's been running great until a couple of weeks ago where it dived bigtime in performance. I suspected it was a new 3rd party battery (had been running great for a couple of weeks as well), which was the problem. The battery did indeed have a problem and without AC power, the laptop would at last not even start. I took the battery out completely and started the laptop on pure AC power and it worked great for another week. Now, I have the problem again.

Main symptoms:
- IO 4x less than usual
- Slow reaction on the entire system
- Applications open and perform very poor and slow
- Windows search never opens for example "dxdiag", I have to run this through the "Run" application.

It's running super slow, IO's is 4x of the normal (see attachments). Random IOps have dropped a lot while sequential read/writes is still the same... Task manager is nowhere near busy and I've tried to disable the page file completely. I do have Symantec AV but this is not affecting the performance at all. Tried to run DISM to check for index corruption, all fine. I also suspected the SATA controller (SSD is not bad since I have tested with another one as well, same result) and tried to update the driver, but to no avail.

Would anyone have an idea? This is like having Internet Explorer all plastered over my machine

Thanks!
- Chris

Could it be malware using up your resources? Use Malwarebytes Antimalware to find out. If you find too many, you may want to check with a second utility to make sure. I would then use Spybot. No need to go Pro, the free versions should do the job. Delete anything found. Also have a look at your startup programs. Press Win+R to open a Run box and execute msconfig to open System Configuration. Then go to the services tab and check the box to hide all Microsoft services. See the remaining services and uncheck the box to disable any non-important (such as updaters). Then click on the Startup tab, Open Task Manager. See all startup applications and disable any non-important (Skype, QTtask, Java updater etc). You don't need everything to load at startup! You can manually double-click and load the application at any time.