How to know the device driver which is causing the computer to be sluggish (Windows)?

Question

My computer suddenly became sluggish. Task manager didn't help. I had lots of memory (computer has 16GB), SSD and lots of free space. CPU% was less than 5%.

The last change that happened before the sluggishness was reinstalling the gfx drivers because of a gfx card issue.

I removed the gfx drivers, rebooted, installed the drivers, rebooted and computer is healthy and fast.

Now suppose I want to troubleshoot this in the future without knowing what has changed in advance on the computer, for example troubleshooting someone's computer. How would I troubleshoot this? How do I know if a device driver and which one is causing the sluggishness without going through something like a trial and error of uninstalling, reinstalling drivers?

Answer 1

It's very rare that device drivers would cause sluggishness. Certainly the built in, well tested ones are extremely unlikely to (unless you have a hardware issue which is causing it), so if anything you would need to look for third party device drivers and uninstall those, like you did in your case. On the other hand bugs with graphical (i.e. Nvidia and AMD) drivers are extremely common, that's why the companies constantly keep releasing updated drivers. So if your computer is sluggish and you suspect it's a driver issue, the first thing to do is update your graphics driver.