My main computer these days is a Laptop with an SSD.
Besides that, I have a desktop gaming rig. It is from last year, but it still runs recent titles really well. Crysis 2, Witcher 2, Diablo 3, not a problem.
However, after startup it is really slow. Like, Firefox will take half a minute from invocation to window. Steam will take minutes until it is up and responsive. Even the task manager takes, like, dozens of seconds to show up.
Later on, Firefox takes less than five seconds to start and everything is snappy, but the system will take at least fifteen minutes until it gets realistically usable. Luckily, it can be used to start games beforehand, so this is not usually a big problem.
The hard drive is about half full and not fragmented. However, this really seems uncomfortably slow to me, but then my day-to-day computer has an SSD and my expectations might be off. I am really not sure any more.
So, is there something wrong with my system or is this really expected behavior?
Edit: I am running an i5 760 @ 2.8 GHz with 4 Gb of memory on Windows 7 x64 with a Radeon HD 6800.
Edit 2: It seems the "slow" time at the beginning is caused by MsMpEng checking all the executables of all the games I have installed. Thus, this will have built up slowly as I installed more and more games. But why is MsMpEng doing that on every startup?
Best Answer
On Windows 7 there's a great utility called "Resource Monitor", it will show what apps are using the disk/cpu/network/memory (sort by the different columns to zero in on a particular resource usage).
Fire it up and watch what's running. Also, have a look in your Event Viewer to see if there are any services having a problem during start-up.