Computer suddenly massively slow however performance has not decreased

Drkalinium · 4 Dec 2015 at 21:48

Suddenly on booting up today my PC has become very slow, not slow to boot but slow to load programes once in windows all the start up programmes but also games have become ridiculously slow to load I have a beefy system but witcher 3 takes 5 mins to load when it took seconds just yesterday.

All my temps are fine and performance wise all the benchmarks I have tried report the same performance as 1 or 2 weeks ago when it was fine. In games my FPS is normal but i get regular and severe stuttering.

I assume its gotta be a software issue? I have been suggested it could be norton anti-virus (but don't see why it would **** on my system all of a sudden) or that the time to authorise my windows 7 copy has run out (the key i used turned out to have had all the installs used).

Ideas anyone?

kayomani · 4 Dec 2015 at 21:50

Check the smart status of your disks

Drkalinium · 4 Dec 2015 at 21:54

sorry total idiot here how would I do that?

kayomani · 4 Dec 2015 at 21:55

There are quite a few out there but i'd suggest a trial of Stablebit scanner

Drkalinium · 4 Dec 2015 at 22:00

Ok thanks got it scanning now

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 06:45

My HDD is healthy so its got to be something else, I may try to revert to an early point if i have any backups

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 06:52

Sadly I have no earlier points, my only idea is maybe norton anti virus' performance optimiser or some storage controller on my pc has crapped it up? I can just reinstall windows i guess but see it as a final option.

bledd · 5 Dec 2015 at 08:07

Look in Event Viewer, System, filter for 'disk' and 'Disk', see if there are any hard drive errors showing.

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What does Task Manager show, is there a Process using a lot of CPU or Disk or Memory?

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:24

No hdd erorrs showing in event viewer, i do keep getting (the driver driver WUDFRd failed to load for the device ACPI\PNP0A0A\2&daba3ff&1.) i dont know if that could be related? and sitting on desktop with nothing more than steam open i have between 80-100% 'highest active time' in resource monitor but the MB/sec Disk I/O is overing around 1-3 not sure if this is normal or not, it occasionally goes higher to 10-30 in peaks like a few minute.

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:26

the highest write programe is between 300,000-1,200,000 b/sec and the read seems to be between 1.1-7 million b/sec. Again no idea if this is unusual or not. That is disk activity not processes with disk activity which is a much shorter list of much less intensive programmes.

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:34

playing witcher 3 again it seems like the HDD is just not reading as fast as it did the day before like textures and distant objects are taking so long to load in like 1-2 minutes before armour textures and distant objects are there but the FPS is still very high. Windows updates also took an enormous amount of time to install because i thought they might help.

Randomface74 · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:38

In that rig you should have an SSD. And you should not have Norton installed.

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:42

I am buying it for christmas

thinking of getting a 500GB evo 850. And Norton came with my mobos utility disk, what is wrong with it? I have heard negative things would uninstalling be enough? I do have malwarebytes for my proper anti virus but just the free base version

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:47

also just downloaded microsoft secureity essentials heard it was ok for always on protection

Jim99 · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:52

It's a resource hog, and has a habit of slowing your PC down as a result (Norton that is).

Stick with MSSE and use Malwarebytes every week/month or something if you want to double-check.

But overall if you're getting an SSD I'd wait until you've got that before you waste tonnes of time checking things out. And perhaps you should make it a clean install onto the SSD as well.

Randomface74 · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:54

http://lifehacker.com/5958001/the-5-biggest-myths-about-slow-pcs-and-how-you-can-actually-fix-them

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 09:59

Jim99 said:
It's a resource hog, and has a habit of slowing your PC down as a result (Norton that is).

Stick with MSSE and use Malwarebytes every week/month or something if you want to double-check.

But overall if you're getting an SSD I'd wait until you've got that before you waste tonnes of time checking things out. And perhaps you should make it a clean install onto the SSD as well.

Oh yeah I was thinking of getting 10 for my SSD or at least finding someones copy of 7 that has a enough installs left that i can upgrade to 10, and this install is only 20 days old really didn't fancy having to reinstall again :/

billysielu said:
http://lifehacker.com/5958001/the-5-biggest-myths-about-slow-pcs-and-how-you-can-actually-fix-them

I failed at number 1 :/

I have just uninstalled norton and run a security essentials and maleware threat scan which came up with nothing i will check how the pc fairs now and report back

Drkalinium · 5 Dec 2015 at 10:18

Its still ridiculously slow to boot like considering the otherwise meaty system its silly I think I may just reinstall windows