Windows 10: What, in your opinion, could cause Windows to be extremely sluggish, in particular when...

I have made a living diagnosing and fixing Windows PCs for over 10 years now, so I have seen all sorts of stuff. I saw a computer that was dirt slow because the customer had inadvertently caused Windows to start indexing the page file by adding the entire C drive to the Windows Media Player music library. I saw a laptop that’s mousepad would not work whenever it was plugged in and charging. No fix for that one, we determined it must’ve been a mobo issue and no sense replacing the mobo on a laptop worth less $500. But this issue I have on my home computer is particularly odd. It started about a year and a half ago, when I drag a desktop shortcut icon to a new spot, or do that but right click drag and say ‘copy here’, it gets very sluggish and takes anywhere from 5 to over 10 seconds to do it. I can see Explorer slamming the CPU when this is happening. It has always gone away with a clean install of Windows, but then ALWAYS returns over time, and the two most recent installs have reverted to this behavior within a day or less.

At this point I have two theories. My money is on the second one:

1. Data corruption. It is possible that this is due to a hard drive issue, but my desktop is on a Samsung SSD, as is my Windows installation. It is more probable that any data corruption would be caused by corruption in RAM. I intend to test that soon, but I am going to need to test individual modules, one at a time, over a period of days, because I use this computer all the time and I have 32 GB of RAM.
2. Hardware compatibility with Windows 10. I highly suspect most of the issues I have been having (with web browsers as well) are due to the fact that my Gigabyte motherboard was manufactured before Windows 10 was released, and while it IS officially Windows 10 compatible, and there ARE Windows 10 drivers available on the Gigabyte website, at least a couple of the drivers available for previous Windows OS’s are not available for Windows 10. In particular, there is no chipset driver. So Windows just puts in some generic driver through Windows Updates. Initially this computer ran great on Windows 10, so I theorize that, over a couple of years of major updates, my computer has basically become less and less compatible. A lot of the issues seem to possibly have something to do with video card stability, but I think this is also due to that same issue. The video card has to communicate with the PCIe bus on the motherboard in order to function after all, doesn’t it?

Thanks for any insight anyone might have on this issue. : )

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:)

 

Windows 10 running extremely slowly, programmes unresponsive

I'd suggest pressing Ctrl-Shift-Escape and looking at which program is hogging the most CPU or Disk % in the Task Manager list. That'll show you which program is causing the slowness. I have some examples and more details under a blog post titled Fix
a Sluggish, Slow PC.

 

What are actual leading causes of PC sluggishness in 2017? (Facts, not myths, please!)

I define PC sluggishness as:

Carat lagging behind keystrokes by 1-10 seconds.

Apps not responding promptly to common commands such as file save, file exit.

Frequently having to wait for the spinny ring to stop spinning.

PC Sluggishness seems to occur even when Task Manager and Process Explorer show that there is no PC resource that is maxed out and when there is still plenty of room on the hard drive. These tools have not helped me to diagnose the root cause of these problems.

I'm really not looking for the same old advice (i.e. Reinstall Windows, Get more memory, Buy an SSD, or Run a Virus Scan, Disable Some Startup Programs, Buy my PC tune-up software, etc.)

I would like to know:

The specific mechanisms by which a PC becomes sluggish.

Tools that can root cause the source of the sluggishness to a specific application.

A list of apps that have been established to be culpable in causing sluggishness.

A list of specific "top fixes" for PC sluggishness.

Thanks to anyone who replies who really knows what's going on under the hood of a typical PC!

 

method to determine exactly what caused a particular update?

Two suggested articles from Microsoft....

• Fix Windows Update errors
• Troubleshoot problems updating Windows 10

Whether you find the exact cause will determine the level of troubleshooting you go through.