Solved W7 Ultimate suddenly very slow

[Rincewindwiz]

Hi
No idea what happened but suddenly W7 became very slow. Windows started fading in and out (as opposed to opening and closing) tabs on browsers slid across.
Sleep produces a gentle fade out of the window and starting up causes the windows to fade in over 3 or 4 seconds
Some app menus slide in from the side.
Sometimes closing a tab on firefox causes the other tabs to slide to their new position and sometimes they jump their (as normal)

TaskMgr shows minimal CPU, 3GB of free physical memory
All options in 'Adjust appearance and performance' are unticked
I tried a restore which seemed to work for a bit.but then back to glacially slow
Malwarebytes says no viruses


So what can I do to remove this effects and return to a normal speed of operation

 

[TechnoMage2016]

Hmmm! That's a head scratcher alright.
Is your hard drive a mechanical Spinner, or an SSD?


There is a failure mode on the old spinners, that causes them to transfer data really S...L...O...W !
I've not seen that for some time now, but once you see it, you'll never forget it.


I'd love to have that PC here to troubleshoot. It's what I've done for 40 years.



Good Luck!
TechnoMage

 

[Rincewindwiz]

PC has two HDD
C; and D: are a single SSD
E: is a 1TB Spinner (in the DVD bay)
Not sure C: is a problem. 23GB free and large file transfer reports write speeds between 100 and 150MB/

 

[Megahertz07]

PC has two drives
C; and D: are on a single SSD
E: is a 1TB Spinner (in the DVD bay)
Not sure C: is a problem. 23GB free and large file transfer reports write speeds between 100 and 150MB/

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and if you want to schedule to next start = yes

chkdsk d: /f
It will say your disk is in use and if you want to unmount =no; schedule to next start = yes

chkdsk e: /f
It will say your disk is in use and if you want to unmount =no; schedule to next start = yes

Restart
Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc

 

[Rincewindwiz]

Chkdsk reports no errors on any drive (Sorry should have said that in the original post)

SFC reports no errors


Problem appears less prevalent after a reboot

 

[Megahertz07]

Disable WUpdates in Services=manual and on WU set to never check.

 

[RolandJS]

Techno & Mega -- could a 3rd party utility that worked just fine for a long time now suddenly go rouge? Using more resources than before and not immediately letting go during sleep, restart, or poweroff?

 

[SIW2]

Rouge?

 

[RolandJS]

SIW2, for example: I had been using Ghostpress Anti-Keylogger for a few years, no problems. Suddenly, Chrome and Firefox keyboarding operations got really strange -- pressing any key would generate a different key entirely. I thought it was one of my security programs installed just prior to the strange behavior. After some troubleshooting, I discovered the keyboarding problem went completely away after uninstalling Ghostpress. For whatever reason, that nice utility in my mind went "rouge". I do not think any less of Ghostpress than before, I simply can no longer use it in my two Windows 7 Pro laptops.

 

[Megahertz07]

Roland, in your example an Anti-Keylogger is a memory resident program and interacts with some programs, like browsers. If you change the browser (and they are constantly changing) it may act a different way compared to an old browser version.

See if there is a new Ghostpress Anti-Keylogger version.

 

[RolandJS]

Mega, good idea you have, lemmie later on see what new Ghostpress is out there...will report back if tried & it succeeds or fails.

 

[Rincewindwiz]

Stop WUpdate? Why?
I have the problem now not after a WUpdate

Win 7 doesn't get updates anyway. Just Office stuff turns up


Beginning to think problem might be to do with latest release of firefox. OK so I had some 20 tabs open but that resulted in 9 firefox processes taking a total of 5GB and I only have 12GB


Will do some more testing in the next 24 hours and come back


But it makes little sense. I have previously often had multiple process open an minimal free memory and I didn't get this awful fade in fade out of windows and slide across of menus

 

[Megahertz07]

If Windows Update on Services is automatic, every time you start the computer it will look for updates using some resources making it lag. As there is no more updates, it is useless so set it to manual.
For Office, run WU manually (search for updates).

I also have Firefox with 10 opened (pined) tabs and have very little used memory. Don't think Firefox is the problem.

 

[Rincewindwiz]

Well there is something odd going on
Chrome is running with 2 tabs open but taskmgr reports 9 chrome process running using 0.5Mb
Firefox is running with 8 tabs open and Taskmgr reports 8 firefox instances running using a total of 1.3GB
and screens are fading as opposed to appearing; scrolling is slow even typing is slower.


Taskmgr reports

CPU 1- =- 20%
HDD not much activity. Highest Active Time 89%

memory 12GB Cachd 3.9GB Available 4GB Free 0.1
But resource monitor reports only 66% free memory (presumably (14 - 4) /12) used so memory not the problem?
So why so slow?
Why sill fading windows (option unticked in performance)

 

[Megahertz07]

chrome will show on taskmgr even if not open. It loads on startup to spy everything you do, not only online.

Did you turn off WU as I recommended in post#6?

 

[Rincewindwiz]

I dont really see the point. WU is not the cause of the slowness - at least not as you describe it. This is not start up issue. Currently the PC has been running for early 2 days and the problem persists


Normal W7 startup from standby goes thus
Pwd screen flashes up
enter password
Welcome screen disappears quickly and desktop appears


On the problem PC
the Pwd screen flashes up
enter password
Welcome screen fades out to black (4 sec)
the desktop fades in (4 sec)

All performance options are unticked (but it still says custom - makes no difference if I tick best performance)

So why are all these visual effects still operating if they have been unticked?

 

[Megahertz07]

What antivirus you have?
Did you do a full scan?

Did you try a clean boot (MSconfig - disable all startup programs and all non MS services)?

 

[Rincewindwiz]

Windows defender.
Malware bytes (free) for additional scanning
Full scan reports no problems


Not done clean boot - not had the time.
BTW: I only show 3 restore points and yet they are only using 10 out of the allowed 38GB. Why only 3 (even after ticking show more)? Do they get deleted when you restore from them?

 

[Megahertz07]

I can't say much about restore points as mine are disable.
Instead of restore points (that I found to be sometimes useless), after a clean install with Office and all updates, I do a disk image (I call basic template) and periodically I do a disk image of the current.
Every two years, I recover from the basic template and reinstall all other software.

 

[RolandJS]

"Stop WUpdate? Why? I have the problem now not after a WUpdate."
I think the poster suggesting WU stoppage was attempting to remove one more variable that could be contributing to the slow-down problems. By temporarily stopping WU automatic operations, you have one less possible variable. Because WU OPs was one of a few things that was slowing down my laptop operations, I did something similar a long time ago, I had my WU set to: notify me, let me choose what to download and install.