Massive Computer Slowdown On Most Everything

I feel dumb asking this, being A+ certified and all that, but I'm not sure what to start at. So this problem has been getting progressively and progressively worse, and now it's to the point where using my computer is becoming a hassle. There's still some things for me to do, but I wanted to get the ball rolling here, since it's getting stupid now. I think it may be my hard drive, but I'm not so sure. Here is a quick summary of my specs:

Windows 7 64 bit

6 GB Ram

Intel i7 @ 2.3 GHz

HDD: 500 GB ST750LM022 HN-M750MBB

GPU: Nvidia 660M

So the problem is that I get massive slowdown very frequently. Opening programs, playing any modern games, even switching to a different process (like bringing steam into focus). Here's the reason I think it's a hard drive issue, every time I experience slowdown, I'm getting a massive spike on the page faults/sec graph, and the processes that are going non-responsive show anywhere from 15-30 page faults. I'm thinking my disk drive is slow in returning these requests from the RAM. Another reason is that it seems like opening a file explorer takes a long time to open and detect files.

There's some other issues I can think of.

Just for fun, I ran a registry scanner. It detected 464 issues, but I haven't looked into that yet, since I'm not sure if I should be taking it seriously, I know lots of registry cleaners just feed you whatever they think will make you satisfied, and I don't really want to tell it to fix it unless I know they're legit.

The other problem I can think of is that it's because my CPU is woefully slow. I think this may be part of my issue with games.

Anyway, here's what I plan to do tomorrow, if people think it's a good idea:

make a small ubuntu partition and attempt to boot from there, see if it has the same slowdown

run a pc benchmarker and see what it says.

Thanks for any help. I plan to get a completely new computer soon, but I'd like to use this for as long as I can.

EDIT: I ran a memory diagnostic, and there's no problems, but it's still using more memory than what I count. It's using 4.5x the amount. If I check the resource monitor, I count that it's reporting 1.5x the amount that I count.

Even in safe mode, it uses 1 GB

Also, still getting that nonresponsiveness and system pausing.

My memory usage suddenly went down to 30%, but I still have issues.

One thing I'm noticing is that it's taking a shockingly long time to close processes.

Brian W

Posted 2015-06-27T03:00:55.973

Reputation: 1

1What does Task Manager/Process Manager tell you about memory usage? CPU usage? – oldmud0 – 2015-06-27T03:03:14.870

chkdsk /R c: on the hdd and see if you have bad sectors. If you have a 500gb hdd you should upgrade to a 512gb ssd and get awesome speeds. Clearly if you need more hdd you would have upgraded by now. As oldmud0 asks Task manager and sort by CPU useage percentage and what is using the most. – cybernard – 2015-06-27T03:21:05.900

Are you running low on disk space in your C: drive? Trying running a disk clean up your C: drive and perform a disk defragmentation on it. – Ayan – 2015-06-27T03:23:00.343

oh right, so my cpu usage ranges between 0% and 30% (at intensive times, like when playing a game). The RAM is about 40% at system idle, and around 75%-85% on most intense games. Star Citizen goes at 90%, but star citizen has high ram cost. The ram does not change when there's slowdown. This is weird though. For example, I am at the recommended RAM for Cities Skylines. However, when I play it, it's at 85% ram, and runs poorly, even though it has only 2.5 GB working ram. Even at idle, 48% seems high, even when I count up the memory used. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T03:53:42.160

I've run both of those in the past Ayan, I have a scheduled disk defrag weekly that runs, and I checked the fragmentation when I first noticed problems, and I had very low rates. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T03:56:28.847

Here's a good example of my problem, I only was looking at 50% memory usage, I right clicked on an icon to get the menu, and it took me nearly 2 minutes for it to show up. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T03:59:48.787

Not sure if you've already checked this but look in the %temp% directory. If it has more than 1000-1500 entries it could impact the whole performance of your computer. I usually use ccleaner to clean it out but you can delete everything in it manually too (everything that's not delete-able is in use and can stay). – Rik – 2015-06-27T05:59:15.293

This looks like a faulty HDD. run this tool and look if you have SMART errors: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

– magicandre1981 – 2015-06-27T06:38:42.413

Im also gonna say HDD failure. 30 PF/s is nothing, my browser will hit 8000+/s and still be responsive – Richie Frame – 2015-06-27T10:23:42.293

I'm going to try running that CrystalDisk tool. After running the chkdsk repair overnight, I'm noticing some small performance increases, but there's still some issues. For example, I'm using 3.5 GB according to my performance and resource monitor, but looking at the memory in the private working set, it's certainly not that much, and looking at the committed memory, it certainly seems less than 3.5 GB – Brian W – 2015-06-27T14:11:19.120

I'm running crystal disk, the read error rate, reallocated sector counts, seek error and seek time, spin retry counts, are all above the threshhold, actually I think everything is above the threshold, but half of those thresholds are 0. Lots of other things seem bad, like 256 uncorrectable sector counts. However, the health is still listed as good. How do I check for SMART errors specifically? – Brian W – 2015-06-27T14:52:33.450

also now I'm at 72% memory usage, and everything still looks the same as far as memory usage in detail, but now I'm using 4 GB, doing nothing but having chrome open. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T15:05:33.923

Magicandre1981's answer looks like a pretty good bet. However, on the off-chance that isn't the issue, another condition that can cause these symptoms is running two virus checkers in the background. – fixer1234 – 2015-06-27T18:05:51.723

I should mention, that all of the numbers I listed is the normalized values, not the raw ones. – Brian W – 2015-06-28T23:58:15.197

Answers

I'm running crystal disk, the read error rate, reallocated sector counts, seek error and seek time, spin retry counts, are all above the threshhold, actually I think everything is above the threshold, but half of those thresholds are 0. Lots of other things seem bad, like 256 uncorrectable sector counts.

This indicates a completely broken hard drive. You should replace it as soon as possible. You should now buy a SSD to get a great performance improvement.

magicandre1981

Posted 2015-06-27T03:00:55.973

Reputation: 86 560

Thank you for the link, my HDD has been acting up for a while, and it seemed like it would hold out, but the recent troubles, and the bad crystal disk report seems like it would indicate that it's on its last legs. I'm going to make a backup on my expansion drive overnight, and I'll start shopping for new options. – Brian W – 2015-06-28T03:11:42.057

hey, so I was listing the normalized values. The raw values are low. – Brian W – 2015-06-28T23:57:12.670

like 0 low. So is my disk not the issue? – Brian W – 2015-06-29T00:12:51.533

However, the write error rate is gigantic – Brian W – 2015-06-29T00:17:24.173

Seagate uses vendor-specific counts in their SMART readings, so whatever a regular SMART tool might say is probably totally off. – oldmud0 – 2015-06-29T03:56:47.307

so what does that mean for me then? I've tried a lot of diagnostics, and I still can't figure out what's causing the issues, the only thing I can think of doing is reinstalling windows, and that would be a huge pain. I have all my data backed up, but that means another weekend of work for unknown gain. – Brian W – 2015-06-29T03:59:21.183

post a picture of the tool which shows all SMART data. – magicandre1981 – 2015-06-29T04:01:27.667

link – Brian W – 2015-06-29T04:06:46.257

resize the Window to show all values, but spin-up time is very large. This means it takes over3s to speed up the drive to be able to read/write data and this explains you lags. – magicandre1981 – 2015-06-29T04:11:53.880

the window's as big as it can get, so I had to break it into two images. There should be two images in that link. So that would indeed explain it. I'm assuming that it is just caused by the disk being 4 years old? If you think that explains it, I would agree that it makes sense. Although, the spin up time is still in the default health threshold. – Brian W – 2015-06-29T04:16:59.400

look at the Write Error Rate (The total count of errors when writing a sector), this value is over 59 thousand! – magicandre1981 – 2015-06-29T04:20:45.603

yeah, I noticed that. That certainly seems like a problem. Or maybe it's a misinterpretation of the smart data? – Brian W – 2015-06-29T04:23:52.037

have you replaced the HDD? IS Windows now fast again? – magicandre1981 – 2015-07-11T06:07:45.637

A basic diagnostic step is to check out the Event Log and see if there are any clues as to what may be going wrong during the slowdown periods. To do this, open the "Event Viewer" application and look in the Application and System logs.

Saulysw

Posted 2015-06-27T03:00:55.973

Reputation: 345

Looking at the event log, it seems there's a lot of warnings about the maximum file size for startup trace things being reached, I get errors about that too Other errors as well, like application faults – Brian W – 2015-06-27T14:46:45.380

You should "research" (ie google search) the errors and warnings. Even sometimes the information entries are important. Unfortunately, sometimes errors/warnings are "normal", but most of the time they need some sort of attention. In your case, the application faults are clues. Are they the sames ones each time? Are they regular? Was it caused by some action you were doing? etc. This is detective work and can take some time to get to the bottom of. Sadly, it could be hardware like faulty RAM, but I'd put my money on software to start with. – Saulysw – 2015-06-27T15:08:51.107

Another thing I would do as a basic diagnostic is to run a CHKDSK on C (as already suggested by Cybernard) to make sure the directory structure is ok. I might also then run a malware/antivirus check too. I find Malwarebytes Antimalware (free) software pretty good, and Trend Housecall. – Saulysw – 2015-06-27T15:11:04.590

I have avast, but I'll run it's antimalware scan now. As for the errors, I can investigate those app fauts in detail. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T15:14:37.340

You may need to change the settings on your event logs so that they have more space and also automatically overwrite old entries. Right-click the log (eg "application") and get the properties. You may also have a bunch of things in the Windows Error Reporting, and it may be slowing down when things go wrong because it is saving a lot of info to the hard drive as a diagnostic. Check your WER settings and history (in the Control Panel\System and Security\Action Center) – Saulysw – 2015-06-27T15:20:19.547

I have avast, but I'll run it's antimalware scan now. As for the errors, I can investigate those app fauts in detail. Also, as I said above (but it's hidden), I did run chkdsk, and got mild performance increases, but issues still persist. See that comment for more details. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T15:21:05.000

I just read the stuff about your HDD. If any tool reports faulty sectors the time is NOW to backup to another drive. Where there is smoke there is fire. What is often the case is that the drive will be remapping sectors as they fail, and this takes a while. Some brands of machines (Dell, HP, Lenovo etc) have diagnostics partitions you can get at boot time to check the SMART disk results. Disk failure is fairly common. – Saulysw – 2015-06-27T15:28:29.433

I have a lenovo, so should I go into the boot options and run a disk diagnostic? Also, it seems like some of my problems with games are being caused by access violation exceptions. I bought a backup drive once my disk first started behaving strangely, so I will run a full backup once my malware scan finishes. I realize disk failure is fairly common, especially since my computer is old, and a disk problem would certainly match up with the fact that my slowndowns seem to happen whenever I get a page fault. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T15:32:42.643

also, would disk problems cause load on the RAM? I'm just very confused why it reports 75% of memory usage when the numbers don't add up, and I don't have really that much open. – Brian W – 2015-06-27T15:39:40.213