PC going slow/unusable after idle for a while

Phemo

Phemo

Phemo

Soldato
Joined
6 May 2004
Posts
6,070
Location
Fareham
Hi guys,

I've recently knocked up a PC to use for Plex/storage duties. It was an Athlon 5350 low power box which ran pretty well but I needed a bit more CPU grunt so I built a new system and transferred the storage hard drives across to it.

When it's first up and running it's absolutely great. It boots up Windows in about 10-15 seconds from power on and everything is instant. However when it's been left alone for a day or so it starts to run ridiculously slow. It took about 6 minutes for Chrome to load, for example and rebooting Windows now takes 2-3 minutes every time. I don't have a TV/monitor hooked up to it directly but my Remote Desktop session takes ages to establish too whereas it was instant before.

I reinstalled Windows on Sunday and started again and once again it was lovely and quick initially. I've only just had a chance to log back into it to see how it was (3 days later) and it's knackered again. Chrome's back to taking minutes to load and even Edge, while faster than Chrome, takes a lot longer than it should to start up. Everything is stupidly slow and no Ryzen system should struggle with this.

I've got no idea where to even begin troubleshooting this as I have no doubt that if I reinstall Windows again it'll be absolutely fine but I'm not doing that every couple of days. One thing I do notice is that every time I try to load Chrome, Task Manager reports the disk usage for the OS SSD as 100% and it remains that way until it eventually loads - even though the actual throughput figures are 1-2MB/sec. Because of this, the only thing I can think of is that the SSD is knackered. It's only a cheap one but since it's for an OS drive on a system I don't directly use, I wasn't too bothered about high performance.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where I can begin with this? I've tried a different PSU (EVGA Supernova G2 850w as a test) so I'm pretty confident it isn't that. My next step is to put another SSD in there and see how it goes but I probably won't get round to that until the weekend. CPU temps are fine - around low to mid 30s, so it isn't getting hot. CPU usage in Task Manager is also very low, even while waiting millennia for Chrome to load.

It's a fresh install with sod all on there so nothing is running in the background except for Plex Server. I'm sure it's not a Windows issue directly because it now takes minutes to even boot it up with next to nothing installed and nothing even changed from when it was taking seconds.

Full system specs are:

Ryzen 3 2200G with Wraith Prism cooler from my 2700X
Gigabyte GA-AB350M-D3V
8GB Ballistix Sport LT 2400MHz
120GB Adata SU650 SSD
500w EVGA PSU
Assorted mech HDs for storage
Windows 10 1803 with all latest updates and drivers installed

Any thoughts? :)
 
I did check event viewer out on the first install but haven't on the second yet. Will do that on this one though, thanks.

The OS still runs like a dog even with all the mech drives disconnected so I'm fairly confident it isn't those. I've got the storage drives back in the original system for now so they're out of the equation.
 
Check task manager in the performance tab or hit the windows key and type perfmon to view performance monitor which should narrow down whats eating all your resources.

Leaving any computer on for days at a time can cause a slow down through as a lot of background processing continue eating away at system resources so a simple reboot from time to time would sort it out.

Chrome is another memory hungry application that may be the problem or at least part of it, try opera or mozilla, great browsers without the constant need to eat all your memory.
 
Task Manager doesn't seem to give any indication of any problems. CPU, RAM and disk usage are low when it's idle so it seems to be fine until you attempt to launch Chrome. Edge loads quicker than Chrome but the whole system is a dog. I've uninstalled Chrome just in case, but something more fundamental is wrong because after a reboot the OS itself sits on the blue Windows flag load screen for 2 minutes. It'll then switch to a black screen for a minute or so before finally deciding to log in. Prior to being left idle, it would boot up in seconds just as any half decent machine with an SSD should.

It never did this before it had been left idle for a while, so something somehow has trashed Windows in some way as it's always screwed up immediately during boot, let alone before it even gets into Windows. The system it replaced was quite happy being left on for weeks at a time with no issues at all. The only thing that will make it work properly again is another reinstall of Windows, but I'm pretty confident the problem will occur again before too long.

All I can think of is that the OS SSD is screwed. It's not beyond the realms of possibility, so when I decide I can be bothered to, I'll pull another SSD out of another system and try it with that.
 
I'd still use performance monitor to get more detail it's a much more in depth analysis of the entire system whereas task manager is just a brief overview.

You can access performance monitor from the performance tab in task manager or by hitting start and typing perfmon.
 
Just checked in on it again after switching the SSD out. It seems to be absolutely fine now. I reinstalled 2 days ago and installed the same stuff that I had on there before. I've just logged in to check up on it and it's running great. No slowdown, everything loads just as quick as it should and Windows still reboots quickly.

The problem before was made more confusing by the fact that after it started going slow, Windows took minutes to load on every reboot which is why I didn't think it was a software issue. I've never seen any SSD system take minutes to fire up before but I'm glad it's fixed. Now I'm curious about this SSD - wonder if it's just a weird compatibility problem or if it's knackered :)
 
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