0
I'm working with one family member's laptop - she's running an Asus laptop, UX360C, running 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD and and intel m3-7y30 cpu. It was bought like 2 years ago but it runs unbearably slow. So much as starting Firefox or going to any website, hell - even typing in the start menu is so slow that even the letters appear with a lag. It gets these crawl periods all the time, then behaves OK for a few seconds but then coming to a crawl again if you so much as want to change the window.
I've checked the most obvious places like autostart but it's basically empty apart from things like Bitdefender. There's no malware, no viruses, the laptop has been under Bitdefender's protecion since day 1. It's running Windows 10, I removed all the evident Asus bloatware. The browsers are clean, no toolbars or similar garbage. And said party member is a pretty conscious user and she can spot obvious scams so it's not like it's because of her random browsing habits and/or downloading random malware from the net.
I've also checked resmon readings during a sample, typical scenario: starting up the laptop, opening Firefox, going to GMail, opening the first mail from the top. It was slow as hell, becoming unresponsive inside the windows basically 90% of the time. The readings, though? 50% load tops, both on CPU, disk and RAM, the whole time:
Why is that so and what else can I try to prevent this? It just seems like it has no right on earth to perform so poorly with these specs and such a clean system, the readings seem to agree, and yet - it does.
EDIT: I've tried uninstalling Bitdefender but it doesn't change anything. Everything is still just as sluggish. So much as scrolling down a window causes constant lags, it doesn't even have to be anything online - and yet the perfmon readings stay the same...
Straightfw
Posted 2019-08-01T18:31:56.300
Reputation: 223
Since I am going to assume this problem has been around since day 1, have you removed Bitdefender, since it was installed since day 1? You indicatd you removed the ASUS bloatware but did you try using Fresh Start? – Ramhound – 2019-08-01T19:37:26.387
@Ramhound - around day 1 times, the laptop did sometimes slow down a bit but certainly not to the extent visible now so I wouldn't say this precise issue has been there since day 1. Nope, I have not tried removing Bitdefender, I installed it myself since it's also running on my PC and I never had any issues - should I try, even considering it does not show up in the resource monitor as an offender?
And no, haven't done fresh start on the machine. – Straightfw – 2019-08-01T19:40:25.320
Most everything you talk about has something to do with Firefox. Which points to either a BItDefender module assosiated with your browser or Firefox itself. If it makes no difference you can always just reinstall it. – Ramhound – 2019-08-01T19:43:34.393
Do you have another AV product, e.g. Defender running in addition to BitDefender? Check TaskManager (or Process Explorer) for high disk I/O, as well as for CPU usage. Finally, temporarily run another OS from USB (e.g. Ubuntu), to prove whether it's an OS issue or hardware issue. For that matter, the user might prefer another OS, if it's faster. – DrMoishe Pippik – 2019-08-01T23:50:25.443
Some performance issues don't have an easily identifiable cause, for example if there are corrupted system files. If you have an 8 GB flash drive lying around, I would personally consider backing up their data and doing a clean install. Nothing beats the performance of a clean install of Windows and this will almost certainly be quicker than trying to find the needle in the haystack that's causing it to perform badly now. A USB to SSD installation will be blazing fast. – Mr Ethernet – 2019-08-03T14:22:38.710
Have you checked system temperatures? – Natsu Kage – 2020-01-29T16:36:51.120