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Backstory:
About a month ago, a screw holding the backpanel of my laptop fell out and lodged itself into 1 of the USB ports, this caused a lot of heat conduction overheating my laptop consistantly (this is when this alt+tab problem started). It took me about 2 weeks to discover the issue and remove the screw from the port, which now my USB port fried? (it doesnt work).
Note: Aside from this alt+tab performance issue, my laptop is not suffering any other noticeable issue
Issue:
Alt+tabbing takes an excruciating long time to perform and it is very inconsistent. What do I mean by this? Usually Alt+Tab is an instant windows swap, but when I press it, it takes anywhere between 3-10 seconds for the mini windows to pop up (what ur swapping through) and for the screen to actually change. This problem also stacks ontop of itself where if i alt+tab multiple times really fast, it will queue up the alt+tab action and perform them after the previous is done, but each takes a different amount of time to perform.
Why do I alttab multiple times really fast? because this usually temporarily solves the issue, after spamming alt tab, eventually my system speeds up finishes all queued alt+tabs instantly and future alt+tabbing performs instantly as normal. However this temp fix usually does not last longer than 5 minutes.
Maybe important notes?:
1. While my system is performing the queue of alt+tabs, I can technically do anything else with no lag, like type on the current active window, or manually swap windows using the taskbar
2. Manually clicking the windows on the bottom taskbar swaps windows instantly.
3. My CPU, when the alttabbing is lagging is always <15%, usually around 6-11%, and when the speed returns to normal my CPU goes up to around 20-25% usage
4. I tried googling this a bunch and most articles reference fullscreen apps, but i am not playing games or anything. Im swapping between windows like MSWord and chrome with great difficulty
5. My laptop no longer overheats or has loud ass fans running (not sure if this is important)
What I have tried to do to solve the issue with no success:
1. Reboot computer
2. Update drivers
3. Clean up memory
4. Boosted CPU usage in power options to 50-100%
5. Used "perfmon" to check pagefault/s (im like consistantly at 100)
6. Used Process Explorer to check which apps are causing the highest pagefault/s (cuz thats what i read up on another post) and the top app is always different, ive had window system apps be at 600-800k faults like dwm, msmpeng,svchost. and ive also had stuff like chrome or discord at 100k faults. After terminating some processes/restarting my laptop, im still consistantly at 100 on perfmon