Extremely poor performance after W7 Ultimate upgrade.

AC 101m4n · 29 Dec 2014

Hi all:

Earlier this afternoon I used the windows 7 "anytime upgrade" feature to upgrade from windows 7 home premium to windows 7 ultimate.The process completed without errors and the pc restarted. However, the system is now incredibly sluggish. Opening & closing windows is glitchy, sounds are failing to buffer properly, and cpu utilization jumps to 100% under even the slightest load. It is almost as if the CPU itself had been drastically down-clocked, or the on die cache bypassed or disabled in some way. However my hardware monitoring programs (cpu-z etc) all report that the various voltages & frequencies are as they should be.

Furthermore, Sfc /scannow reports no problems & Mbam cannot find any sign of malware.

I did this primarily in order to get use of all 32gb of my system memory, as well as to gain access to a couple of networking features that aren't accessible in the home premium version, but it is rapidly turning out t0 be far more trouble than it is worth!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

AC 101m4n · 29 Dec 2014

I am at my wits end with this.

Just performed a secure erase on my ssd and re-install. System was responsive right up until I entered my w7 ultimate upgrade key, upon which it ground to a halt, just as before.

I have googled extensively for a solution, and it seems that there are a number of cases of the same issue, but no solutions. Just the usual mundane performance tweaks.

Has nobody come across this before??

gregrocker · 29 Dec 2014

So you reinstalled Home Premium and then Anytime Upgraded to Ultimate which is the only way it would accept the Anytime key. I would troubleshoot Home Premium first to see if this issue is restricted to the Upgrade.

Compare the install your did with the perfect install compiled in Clean Reinstall Windows 7 which has been used by over a million consumers without a single complaint or return here with problems by those who stick with the tools and methods given. There are XPired methods which must be left behind to have a perfect Win7 install.

If you feel your install measures up then work through the Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7 starting with the hardware tests.

AC 101m4n · 29 Dec 2014

The problem has spontaneously disappeared. As an engineer this worries me almost as much as the problem existing to begin with, but in this case I will simply count myself lucky.

My advice to any who come across this issue is as follows;
- Make sure all your motherboard device drivers are installed (sound, chipset, sata etc)
- Go through your BIOS settings and ensure that nothing is wonky
- Ensure that all of your windows updates have been installed

I was at the point of desperately changing settings left right and centre when this "fixed itself" so I cannot say for certain what the smoking gun was.

Nonetheless I hope this information is useful to someone.