Notepad takes 8 seconds to open

I have an i7-3930K with 32GB RAM, using 256GB SSD, running Win 7 Ultimate.

It takes 8 seconds to open notepad after going

Win+r -> notepad -> enter

Why is this so SLOW? WTF?

Don't suggest virus/malware please.

EDIT: understood this is hard to answer. So perhaps we could answer how to troubleshoot? I am looking at taskmgr / resource monitor and nothing looks unusual (cpu hardly being used, 10% memory usage). Plenty of space on SSD.

Taskmgr opens instantly.

cmd opens in about 8 seconds too. so irritating.

Edit: both take same time to open as shortcut/exe.

EDIT: After reboot- they are now opening instantly. So what could it have been? Should I be worried? Is it likely to be the health of my primary SSD drive? What could I do to test the SSD drive performance???

user194514

Posted 2013-02-01T05:51:01.517

Reputation: 49

It's very difficult to answer this in any meaningful way. If I had to hazard a guess... is your drive nearly full or heavily used? SSDs can have IO problems if not taken care of. – Marcus Chan – 2013-02-01T05:54:37.193

Hmm. Does notepad open quickly if run from the .exe or from a shortcut? – Marcus Chan – 2013-02-01T06:11:29.000

Use Process Monitor to see what is slow: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-3-Process-Monitor, http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-4-Process-Monitor

– magicandre1981 – 2013-02-01T06:42:34.617

Could your SSD have switched from DMA to PIO somehow? Probably not, but I can't think of anything else... – user541686 – 2013-02-01T07:33:02.713

This actually makes sense. Default Windows apps take long time for me in VDI machine, but other apps don't - they execute directly with absolute path, but Windows apps have to resolve paths, with some of them being over a remote server (to persist files and some settings), which is slower – Z. Khullah – 2019-12-23T17:10:49.717

Notepad takes 8 seconds to open

Answers