I'm a software developer working on a Windows 7 machine with an i5 processor and 16GB of RAM.
Most of the time the machine runs just fine. However, when I boot up in the morning, within 10 minutes of logging in to Windows the machine just drags. It drags to the point where if I type a word, each letter will take 10-30 seconds to complete and while this word is typing out the computer is completely unusable. Nothing is clickable, the UI doesn't update except for the split second each letter shows up on the screen.
What makes this even harder to diagnose is that it doesn't always happen right away when I log in and the UI not updating means that watching the Task Manager, Processes tab filtered by Memory or CPU, the list of the processes being used also does not update. I will watch the CPU and "System Idle Process" sits at 70% and the next highest thing might be a Chrome window at 10% or svchost.exe or "mcshield.exe" (McAfee Virus Scan) but none of them ever show more than 20% processor usage. I have a feeling that something is spiking to higher processor usage (it has to for the machine to be unusable) but the UI doesn't update in time, and when the UI updates again every process has gone down to reasonable levels.
So, how can I figure out what is doing this to my machine?
Best Answer
It will take a bit of trial an error to figure this out, as no program can help if you can't use it due to UI problems.
Make sure everything is updated and nothing is installed that you didn't allow. Then, try booting into Safe Mode and see if the problem persists. If it doesn't, you can try using some of the advanced startup options in msconfig to boot in different states until you see a problem. You can type
msconfiginto the Run dialog to launch it. The link above outlines some basic things to try.Those symptoms may point to a driver problem, as well. You could try going into Device Manager and see if anything has an exclamation point by it indicating a problem it's having.