Slowing PC (Need Advice)

Frizzler

Frizzler

Frizzler

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Joined
6 Jun 2018
Posts
8
Hi all, first of all I just want to say that if this is the wrong section to be posting this then sincere apologies.

So, as you may be able to figure from the title, my PC is starting to slow down drastically. I don't mean 'internet pages are taking long to load' but actually slowing down. I will list my PC spec below before I delve into the specifics.

OS: Windows 10 x64
RAM: 8GB DDR3 (2x4)
CPU: Intel i5-4460 @3.2GHz
GPU: Radeon 7770 1GB
HDD: 500GB Seagate HDD (250GB still free)
Motherboard: H97 Gaming 3

Ok now the specs are listed I can detail the problem(s) I'm having.

I have had my PC for some time now, having built it roughly 3 years ago. I upgraded my CPU + Motherboard (I shorted my mobo out when fiddling...oops) about 2 years ago. It seems that my PC is getting slower and slower as each day passes. This is to the extent where my system is freezing up or slowing just from tabbing from something like Youtube to Discord. The program will freeze subsequently freezing up my whole computer. It takes a long long time to boot up and even attempting to pull up the run command or typing anything in to my windows search bar becomes a long winded task. Games that I was able to run a year or so ago are now struggling and even tabbing out of said games can freeze my whole PC. I've tried a multitude of solutions to try and combat this but I am running out of ideas to the extent that I am considering just buying a whole new PC. Obviously my last resort. I will list what I have attempted now just to give you guys an understanding of what I have tried in order to avoid being given solutions I have tried and tested. These are by no means in chronological order, by the way.

  • Reinstalled whole of Windows last month to try and reset everything.
  • Ran virus scans + chkdsk commands to try and find anything faulty/fishy, scans were clean.
  • Re-applied paste to CPU in the event that the paste was drying up, I also cleaned all hardware of dust etc during this.
  • Disabled unnecessary TSRs
  • Checked for memory leaks, came back negative
  • Ensured all drivers are up to date
  • Defragmented my HDD (this was before I resorted to resetting everything)
  • Removed anything from PC i didn't use (old games etc)
  • Deleted files from Temp folder

From what knowledge I have about a computer's workings I have tried everything I have thought of including some small attempts via google searches and forums scrounging. I'm unsure of what else to do in order to try and resolve this but using this PC is slowly becoming a chore. It is nigh impossible to do anything without programs completely freezing. I have been gaming and building my own PCs for close to 10 years now. I would hate to have to discard this thing if something can be done. Money isn't a luxury for me either so buying a new one really is a last resort and afaik never really a requirement in these cases. If anybody has any other solutions in order to combat this then do let me know.

Thanks for reading guys, I know it was a long one but I'm reaching here.
 
MagicBoy said:
Mechanical hard drive or SSD?
Click to expand...
Mechanical.
Minibiker said:
What kind of games are you looking to run?
How about just adding an SSD to the build to increase load times.. May not completely fix it but its a start...
Click to expand...
It's an option yes, but load times aren't the primary issue here unfortunately. Just for example, even if i was to play Fortnite, running that game on low settings I get FPS drops and freezes...
 
Yeah, I'd start investigations with the HDD...

Mech drives don't do so well with Windows 10. I've just thrown an SSD in Dad's old Core2Duo and it's transformed the responsiveness, it was just sat there thrashing the disk a lot before. Probably SuperFetch trying to be clever.
 
MagicBoy said:
Yeah, I'd start investigations with the HDD...

Mech drives don't do so well with Windows 10. I've just thrown an SSD in Dad's old Core2Duo and it's transformed the responsiveness, it was just sat there thrashing the disk a lot before. Probably SuperFetch trying to be clever.
Click to expand...
postmanfw said:
Test HD speed using hd tune free version and post graph.
Click to expand...

Will run test now and post results, standby.
 
MagicBoy said:
Yeah, I'd start investigations with the HDD...

Mech drives don't do so well with Windows 10. I've just thrown an SSD in Dad's old Core2Duo and it's transformed the responsiveness, it was just sat there thrashing the disk a lot before. Probably SuperFetch trying to be clever.
Click to expand...
postmanfw said:
Test HD speed using hd tune free version and post graph.
Click to expand...

Just ran the test, did a simple benchmark without editing any of the options. Hope this is of some use to you guys.
https://i.imgur.com/KQnkFfm.png
 
What PSU are you using? I would also recommend getting an ssd as the other guys have suggested. In addition, what is your monitor resolution? The 7770 is quite an old card, it might be struggling with new games.
 
theforce said:
What PSU are you using? I would also recommend getting an ssd as the other guys have suggested. In addition, what is your monitor resolution? The 7770 is quite an old card, it might be struggling with new games.
Click to expand...
I’m using an SV650. Had to upgrade my old psu a while ago this ones been running for 2 years no problem. As far as the monitor goes, it’s just a standard ASUS monitor you’d see in an office...because that’s where I got it from ahaha.
postmanfw said:
Looks ok to me apart from the odd high seek time.
Click to expand...
What does the seek time effect?

All in all it looks like my next step is an SSD but I was under the impression that it wouldnt help with these problems.
 
postmanfw said:
Looks ok to me apart from the odd high seek time.
Click to expand...

Not unusual for those family of drives. I used to have a couple of the Maxtor badged version, they did the same.

Seek time is the time it takes to reposition the heads to the correct location on the disk. It's the SSD trump card - it's virtually zero as it just needs to look up a memory location. A mechanical drive needs to work out where something is then physically move the heads and wait for the correct sector to appear under the head before it can start to read. Hence why defragging helps performance by locating files contiguously to stop unnecessary seeks across the disk.
 
Have you checked DPS latency?
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
That could at least give hints if there's some driver conflict.


postmanfw said:
Looks ok to me apart from the odd high seek time.
Click to expand...
Pretty much every single drive has some occasional spike.
For example some sector detected faulty in factory testing and "redirected"/replaced by spare area in end of drive would cause such.
Beyond those "grouping" is actually very nice.

And while STR could be little smoother neither there are major drops or slower areas.
 
Sorry for the bump guys but just an update. I’ve just purchased the following ssd; Kingston A400 120GB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Hard Drive - (SA400S37/120G). From the OC store. My knowledge on SSDs and how to utilise them to the max is fairly limited, if I’m honest it’s next to none. What is it I should be putting on this drive ? My OS or my games. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks guys
 
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