2
At times, for instance after running a resource-intensive program, my normally quite stable Windows7 PC becomes virtually unresponsive for as long as a couple of minutes. Even changing directory in Explorer can show the green progress bar for several seconds, clicking a tab in Chrome causes it to detach in a separate window for 10s, etc.
During this, the CPU usage is virtually zero, nothing is taking more than 1% CPU in TaskManager and the total CPU is often only 2% or so.
Over time, things slowly "heal" to the normal state of responsiveness but computers don't need to heal themselves after working hard!
What problem is this indicative of and what can I do about it? I am running MSE virus-scanner but that's about it for real-time protection.
3Are you including ALL users in the task manager display? By default, you only see your own processes. – mdpc – 2014-04-01T19:50:59.300
2Use the Resource Monitor instead of Task Manager. CPU isn't the only resources that slows down a computer when busy. Check for processes hogging disk access, etc. As @mdpc points out, ensure you're viewing processes for all users, not just yourself. – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2014-04-01T19:54:42.957
3This type of behavior indicates a hdd problem – Ramhound – 2014-04-01T20:04:20.487
I know CPU isn't the only resource, that's the question :) None of my applications are explicitly using the disk i.e. I'm not telling them to and the apps I am testing are not disk-heavy at all. I wondered if this is symptomatic of cache thrashing, too little RAM? – Mr. Boy – 2014-04-01T20:05:16.080
3It sounds like a hard drive problem to me. – joeqwerty – 2014-04-01T20:06:01.723
As in a fault, or just "it's slow" - can you provide an answer with some idea how to diagnose it? – Mr. Boy – 2014-04-01T20:07:08.857
I'd lean towards disk as well . . . especially if the system was fine before, and has started doing this recently . . . Do you hear/feel the disk spinning, and then stopping before the system becomes more responsive? – ernie – 2014-04-01T20:31:10.077
@John Use the Resource Monitor, and if that's not enough fire up PerfMon and add/monitor various performance counters. – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2014-04-01T20:53:03.493
if your computer is going slow then within task manager a process using a lot of RAM can be something to look at too., as in, try terminating it and see if it improves things. I tend to look at that before cpu! – barlop – 2014-04-01T20:55:30.550