My Fastest Hardware Ever = My Slowest Windows 7 Ever!?

I need expert advice because this is completely crazy!

My main desktop system (which I'm posting this from) was recently home-built from the very fastest hardware components I've ever owned, yet in actual usage it's turned out to be among the slowest Windows computers I've ever owned! What's going wrong?

Here's my hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS Z97-A
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
RAM: 16GB G.SKILL Trident X Series DDR3 2666 (PC3 21300) Model F3-2666C12D-16GTXD
Graphics/GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750
Boot/System Disk: Samsung 850 PRO SSD (one of the fastest available)

Here's my OS:

Microsoft Windows 7 Pro SP1-U with all patches and updates

Services and background processes:
Unless requested, I won't list them all, but keep in mind that the computer in question is running the exact same set of services and background processes as almost all of my other Windows 7 computers, all of which run MUCH faster.

Here are the symptoms I keep experiencing on an ongoing constant basis:

- Almost every non-trivial app I launch ridiculously frequently shows "Not responding" for at least 30 seconds and up to 5 minutes for almost all operations!

- If I'm flipping through photos looking for a particular one, I will see delays of from 20 seconds to three minutes between each image, even for small images!

- Clicking on a link on a web page can take up to two minutes to open in a new tab!


Here are the things I've tried to resolve this extreme slowness:

- Run very thorough malware scans with all options enabled (using MBAM and my default Norton AntiVirus) -- Nothing found

- Run SFC /SCANNOW -- Nothing incorrect found

- Run Disk Check -- Nothing incorrect found

- Run System Checkers (e.g., Iolo System Mechanic), including registry problem scans from more than one scan app -- Whatever small problems were found have been corrected without any noticeable speed improvements

- Run Registry Defrag -- Whatever small problems were found have been corrected without any noticeable speed improvements

- Run Disk Defrag -- Whatever small problems were found have been corrected without any noticeable speed improvements

- Run hardware diagnostics -- SiSoft Sandra 2015 thoroughly tested mobo, CPU, RAM, GPU, RAM throughput, disk throughput, disk speeds, IO system bandwidth and throughput, etc, etc, etc, without finding ANY problems or slow hardware. Also, MemTest+ ran for a full day without finding ANY problems.

All told, I haven't found ANYTHING wrong based on tests and diagnostics, but yet this system is still absurdly slow!

What can I do to resolve this deeply annoying problem?

logicearth said:

Well the first thing that comes to mind. What software are you running, specifically what security software? I'm sure if you were running a bare installation of Windows you wouldn't be having problems. It is most likely sone piece of software you installed.

whs said:

I would make an image of this whole system (all partitions) so that you can later roll back. Then install the Windows 10 TP. If that runs equally slow then you have a hardware problem. Else a Windows 7 reinstall may be appropriate.

Windows 10 Technical Preview - Clean Install - Windows 10 Forums

Thanks, folks, and I'm sorry about the great delay in responding, which was mostly caused by how messed up this computer was...

So here's what the problem turned out to be: After working on it for days, it turned out that there were suddenly some SFC problems that couldn't be fixed even after several fix-reboot-fix loops. However, these were extremely minor and were related to my conscious decisions to allow third-party themes to run, so these were no real problem after all.

What WAS a real problem was primarily a clobbered CMOS & BIOS, but in the end I cleared the CMOS and re-burned the BIOS, after which the problem mostly went away! However, there's some sort of lingering mobo problem with my ASUS Z97-A that causes a reboot to take an abnormally long time under certain uncommon circumstances. I could RMA it, but that would leave me without this machine until it could be fixed or replaced, so I've decided to just live with that small-ish problem.


Thanks again for your replies, and I'm closing this thread at solved...