Windows running slowly in specific situations

Over the last few days (since maybe Thursday but definitely Friday) my Win10 machine has been running slowly in certain situations. The programs iTunes, GSAK, and Unreal Tournament 2004 run slowly in general, much slower than my new hardware has been able to output since I bought it less than two months ago. Other programs are substantially slower than normal to load, but act quite fine once they've been loaded (Sid Meier's Civilization V and Overwatch are two notable exmaples - they take up to six times longer to load than they did this time last week). The change was sudden but not noticeable straightaway.

One further change I've noticed is that whenever I go to shut down or reboot the computer, it tells me it's "Getting Windows ready" despite there being no updates to my knowledge. It tends to hang on that screen for some time before it actually shuts down or reboots - I'm not sure how long it takes as I often lose patience and go and do something else, but it's more than expected.

Steps I've already tried:

• rebooting
• antivirus scan
• uninstalling programs I've installed within the last week
• rolling back Windows updates (which I've found to be basically impossible)
• cleaning up the fullest hard drive (I've more than doubled the free space on it)
• updating my video card drivers
• defragging all three hard drives

Any ideas?

This evening, the computer started throwing BSODs that said "DRIVER_VERIFIER_DETECTED_VIOLATION". This message fell to a quick Google search and I discovered that the Driver Verifier program was running when it shouldn't have been. This was my fault. I have disabled Driver Verifier and my system is now running effectively again.

It sounds like the PreFetch and SuperPrefetch files being deleted by some cleaning/snake oil application.
Then when you startup Windows has to remake those again.

The whole purpose of those files is to speed up the loading of applications. Windows does occasionally re-make those on it's own schedule.

When you install something those files are made on first starting the application. If you close the application and re-start it's much quicker than the first time in a session.

"cleaning up the fullest hard drive (I've more than doubled the free space on it)"
That I suspect is the cause of it, the cleaning/snake oil application deleting those PreFetch files, possibly on shut down/restart - look in to that.

I just posted saying the problem has been solved.

BlackOwl said:

This evening, the computer started throwing BSODs that said "DRIVER_VERIFIER_DETECTED_VIOLATION". This message fell to a quick Google search and I discovered that the Driver Verifier program was running when it shouldn't have been. This was my fault. I have disabled Driver Verifier and my system is now running effectively again.

Thanks for posting your good results, BlackOwl. You may want to mark this thread solved. Best of computing to you. :)

I have had the same my computer was getting slower day by day. Then I installed kaspersky onto my PC and scan my all drive. Now it's okey so far.