8 / 8.1 sluggishness

Overall, responsiveness of 8 and 8.1 "feels" like Windows 7 - except when downloading a file in the background...

During a d/l the system becomes sluggish to clicks and very slow to open programs - may take :30 to one minute.

No difference whether the system is set for "programs" or "background" performance. Same thing since 8.0 beta.

Disc is not fragmented. Caches are clear. No error messages appear in event viewer.

Suggestions welcomed. Win 7, on the same 2600K/8Gb RAM machine, has never had the problem.

except when downloading a file in the background...

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That is interesting; however, I have not experienced any noticeable difference myself. Just as a startoff suggestion (or question), have you tried downloading with a few different browsers and received similar results? If not, I would suggest comparing Fuirefox, Chrome and IE to see if there is any difference.
Good luck.

my2cents

my2cents said:

except when downloading a file in the background...

Click to expand...

That is interesting; however, I have not experienced any noticeable difference myself. Just as a startoff suggestion (or question), have you tried downloading with a few different browsers and received similar results?

Click to expand...

That's an interesting thought. Firefox was being used during the most recent slowdown. Tested I.E. - no problem. Retested FF - no problem. So this is intermittent, as if a task in the background is hogging resources. And the culprit doesn't show up in task manager, as I recall from trying to sleuth this in the past.

Occurs routinely, usually during resource-intensive background tasks, but not always. 8.1 is also slow to get up to steam after first boot...slower, I believe, than Win 7 was when it was loaded on the same drive.

Windows Maintenance maybe (ie, scheduled defrag? windows updates?).

my2cents said:

Windows Maintenance maybe (ie, scheduled defrag? windows updates?).

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Nope. All is up-to-date and well there. A very tidy machine. ^_^

Strange that you find this in your machine.
For me, I see Windows 8 and 8.1 (8.1 is a hair less responsive than 8) miles more responsive and smoother than Windows 7.

Win 8.1 was sluggish for me during the 1st week, but now it's running a little better than Win8.

It has run better with time. The old drive's C: partition had 25-30Gb free.
Since upgrading to a new drive (a month ago ) with a 900Gb partition there have been no slowdowns. Yet.

Wouldn't think that the former free space would have been an impediment. But one never knows. ^_^

Free space is actually very important because of fragmentation, it's recommended to have at least 20% of free space on any partition so that any new file fragments can be written contiguously (not fragmented). Although your better performance might also be because the new drive is simply faster.

Anyway degradations in performance on can often be attributed to this free space not being large enough, and even on windows 8 with automatic defragmentation, this problem doesn't disappear (it can actually be worse since defragmentation happens in the background, slows down your system and takes much longer when the system doesn't have enough space to play with : it will have to move much smaller file blocks instead of large ones when you have a lot of free space).