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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.
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
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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 – 2015-06-27T06:38:42.413Im 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