Need help diagnosing my machine

I have something that just slows my computer to a crawl sometimes. Not running anything big. Yesterday all I had running (besides background apps) were Firefox & Windows Explorer and could barely even switch screens.

Nothing showing up in the task manager as hogging CPUs. I have all non-essential services stopped (MySQl & MSSQL) unless I need them.

I made some restore points not long ago, but they disappeared. This is a development mach with a LOT of apps installed, so I really, really do not want to re-install Windows.

So, what I'm looking for are ideas or tools I can use to help diagnose this problem.
The only clues I have is this started right after I

installed Office 2013 (with Office 2010 still installed as well)
installed Visual Studio 2012 (also keeping 2010 as a co-install)
and installed MSSQL 2012 (upgrade from 2008, no co-install)

Also, computer runs fine in Safe Mode. I've just ran out of ideas of what to check.

Any help / suggestions would much appreciated.

Thanks

P.S. I'm running Win 7 Pro (x64). Office is also 64 bit. Visual Studio & MSSQL are 64 bit if that option was available (not sure). 77GB free space on the hard drive. 4GB RAM installed.

Tom Collins

Posted 2014-08-21T00:54:38.397

Reputation: 185

Check the drives busy % and their SMART status. A slow machine is often because something uses all CPU (which you rules out) or because the IO is low (e.g. due to a failing disk). The latter will show up when you check the SMART values, as well in the resource manager, tab disk. (100% busy yet low throughput).

– Hennes – 2014-11-04T13:04:49.257

Answers

Isolating the bottleneck is often the key to solving performance problems. Items such as free hard drive space or available memory will point to the problem. A precise understanding of the applications and services that run at startup is also helpful if direct inspection of hardware metrics such as processor, ram, disk, network use doors not reveal the answer. The majority of those are available using the Resource Monitor, which can be accessed by clicking Start and typing "resource monitor" in the search box (among other ways).

Given your recent large software installations I suspect drive space as a good starting point.

anders-hou

Posted 2014-08-21T00:54:38.397

Reputation: 141

77GB free space on the hard drive. 4GB RAM installed. haven't used the resource monitor before. Will have to look at it. – Tom Collins – 2014-08-21T05:14:08.657

Start with a "clean boot" & then slowly begin adding in start-up items & non-MS services (in MSCONFIG) until you feel that slow-down again.

Have a look at your task scheduler for things starting that might not need to, as well.

Lastly- it could be a coincidence that you were hit with malware at the same time you installed the others- a sweep w/Malwarebytes wouldn't hurt.

Cheers

Tracy

Posted 2014-08-21T00:54:38.397

Reputation: 1