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I'm using an MSI GP60 2PE Leopard running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. It has gotten a bit slugging, but it is very slow and prone to freezing 1 or 2 minutes after logging in. The hard drive light is on constantly during this period. To make things even worse, this is a gaming computer, which shouldn't really be having these problems. So it's either start up programs or drivers that are causing problems.
One time I made a new partition and installed windows 10 on it. It was running smoothly. But then I ran the driver installation disk that came with the laptop on windows 10, and I noticed the frame rate decreased. So drivers seem to be the main culprit.
I went back into windows 7 and opened up device manager and checked how many drivers there were. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, until I came across the system devices. There were 35 drivers installed there.
More info: Chrome takes half a minute to get ready after first run on windows session.
Edit: Games run smoothly and don't seem to be affected by this problem. Edit: The computer runs snappily after the hard drive calms down. Disabling Superfetch (made sure it didn't re enable after reboot) didn't speed up boot. Here was the disk i used to install drivers:
Start with Process explorer. can you find the process generating the IO? failing that Filemon or Procmon should give you some idea. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx
– Frank Thomas – 2016-01-03T00:54:39.937"It has gotten a bit slugging, but it is very slow and prone to freezing 1 or 2 minutes after logging in." indicates an HDD I/O problem. "There were 35 drivers installed there." what is odd about that? – Ramhound – 2016-01-03T00:56:10.550
@Ramhound So it's normal to have 35 drivers under system devices? – FluorescentGreen5 – 2016-01-03T05:38:10.987
the disk IO activity can be caused by superfetch service – magicandre1981 – 2016-01-03T08:24:16.973
Check your hard drive for SMART errors How can I read my hard drive's SMART status in Windows 7?, and What is the easiest method of checking SMART status for your hard drive?
– DavidPostill – 2016-01-03T13:52:36.727@FluorescentGreen - Its not unusual. – Ramhound – 2016-01-03T14:04:45.707
@FrankThomas I set Process Explorer to run at startup. And the first thing i saw on it was a spike. I hovered over it and it said Steam.exe. 5 minutes later, another spike which said Skype.exe. Is steam and skype known for computer startup slowdowns? – FluorescentGreen5 – 2016-01-03T23:39:08.153
well, you said your case IO light was on solid, so that doesn't indicate discrete spikes. can you see the IO activity that accounts for the light? – Frank Thomas – 2016-01-04T08:13:18.370
@magicandre1981 i have disabled superfetch and it hasn't helped. guys you have to remember the suspicion lies in the installer disk i used: http://i.stack.imgur.com/jaw4k.jpg
– FluorescentGreen5 – 2016-03-03T05:06:30.510Install the WPT (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4847.install-the-windows-performance-toolkit-wpt.aspx also works for win7),run WPRUI.exe, select First Level, DiskIO, FileIO and under Performance Scenario select Boot. Number of iterationcan be set to 1 and click to start. This reboots Win7 and captures the Disk activity during boot. After the reboot let the countdown tick to 0 to capture 2 minutes of activity after boot. Zip the large ETL file into zip/RAR file, upload the zip (OneDrive, dropbox, google drive) and post the share link here.
– magicandre1981 – 2016-03-03T05:14:39.817@magicandre1981 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5U7QaUZvUenUTczaHlQVFFVc0E/view?usp=sharing also while the problem is still there, my computer is working faster during busy hard drive than is was before
– FluorescentGreen5 – 2016-03-04T00:59:27.877any update on it? – magicandre1981 – 2016-03-26T07:38:04.853
the problem of a computer being slow is minimal now, without uninstalling Trend Micro. Trend Micro has already been paid for and I don't know that many other good AV's out there, so switching to a new AV is not going to be a good idea. i dont want to have to replace my hard drive as i have lots of stuff i don't want to bother transferring and ssd's don't come cheap. unless you know anything about the msi driver utilities disc affecting performance, i don't think there is anything left to do – FluorescentGreen5 – 2016-03-29T00:14:32.743