Win7 keeps warning me about "slow performance" and disables Aero & UI effects. It is decidedly wrong

Question

In the last few days, Windows has started giving me warnings about "slow performance" and subsequently disabling Aero and all the UI effects. I'm getting this a few times a day.

This is Windows 7 Pro x64 running on i7-2760QM, 10 GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 1000M 2GB VRAM, Crucial MX100 series SSD. The WEI is 6.7. Not slow.

The last time it did this, I checked the system metrics at 50% RAM still free and 95% VRAM still free. No overheating, no excessive drive activity, nothing, no perceivable lag in the way the system is running. No friggin' way it's running with "low performance", something is messed up in the Windows system.

I've updated the VGA drivers (problem persists), repair install isn't really an option since the system volume is encrypted. sfc "found corrupt files and successfully repaired them", but I'm not terribly hopeful that will be effective.

Short of doing a clean install (which I should, but don't currently have the time or desire), what else can I look for?

Answer 1

You might look at this question: Disable "Do you want to change the color scheme to improve performance?" warning and the answer posted by 'nars'. His answer is the only one that actually solved the problem for me and others. Most people seem to think that the warning actually "means something". It's a MS message not too different from another: "Who'd ever need more than 640K"? In this case, MS's trigger points are based on fractional points (2/3's and 3/4's for warnings and it switching off the aero desktop). While that heuristic may have worked when GPU memory was smaller, it doesn't, today, when GPU's have GB's of memory.

You can see the graph of my usage:

The middle graph shows memory. The 2 bumps to the right are where it hit the max, bumped me from full screen and asked me what I wanted to do, then continued, with the app regulating its gpu memory down soon after.

In my case, it was kicking me out of a full-screen app to display the warning message at the top of that post when I still had about 1.2GB left. More than enough for most apps. Anyway, nars's fix was to jump around the call to the popup. If you try it, be sure to save the original binary before patching, then copy the original to a new name and patch the new file (I used dwm.bin so I could patch it with gvim). Then I stopped the desktop manager, copied my patched dwm.bin over dwm.exe and restarted the desktop manager (through the Services control panel).

Anyway, note, GPU memory isn't VRAM, the GPU ram it is talking about is "dedicated GPU ram". Use a tool like ProcessHacker to display the GPU memory so you can easily see the usage peaks and upon mouseover, PH will tell you how much is being used and usually, what processes is using the most. PH is at http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/. It's not a cracker tool -- but it does everything sysinternals(an MS website now) Process Explorer does, and much more. It might be described as a taskmanager (the builtin taskviewer) on steroids. It can replace taskmgr.exe as the manager that comes up when you press Ctl-Alt-Del -- though make sure it is set to always be on top if you do that).

Anyway, I digress -- it will show you how much dedicated memory you are using and if that is a real problem. Apparently, "shared" video memory doesn't count. Lemme know if that works. Would be interested to know if 'nars's method works for you if you are comfortable using it (if not, very understandable!)...