Any idea on what is causing slowdowns?

Hi all,

I have a bit of a strange one in terms of performance.
The system in question is a Dell Precision M3800 with 16GB ram and 2x SSDs (Crucial CT480M500) and Liteon LCS412M65) -

The timeline is as follows:
1. Start machine from cold boot and it's into windows very quickly and runs as expected...very quick.
2. After a day or so, resuming from sleep, it's usable but a bit stuttery.
3. After a day, resuming from sleep, it's almost unusable

Now I never shutdown, only close the lid - something I've always done and never had issues until I got to this system.
I know the laptop is more than capable spec wise

Looking at task manager- nothing taxing at all when it's slow. Disk/CPU/Network/Memory usage is low.
Right now, I have the slow issue in point 2 - usable but not pleasant.
Opening Task Manager (took 8 seconds instead of the normal 1) :
Cpu: 4% Mem: 29% Disk: 1% and network 1%

I've reformatted and clean installed several times but always come to the same conclusion.

So what am I missing?
I'm not a big installer on software as most my development stuff is in VMs which are obviously not running and this time round, not even on the system nor is VMware.

Only common software between installs are Office 2013, chrome, firefox, brother multifunctional drivers/apps and thats pretty much about it.
Startup apps are low.
Antivirus is Avast Premier

I should also point out that when it gets to between point 2 and 3, chrome for instance just does not load (or takes around 5 minutesbefore it appears).
Firefox gets jittery and even doing something simple like going from one cell to another in excel is a chore.

Anything else I can check/anything you can advise?
Thanks all

Did you probably make any changes recently in Control Panel > System or msconfig ?

Nope no changes made there
Anything in particular you're thinking that could be a cause?

Should note, I am on the latest set of updates and on 8.1 Pro

I am not a big fan of antivirus and I saw cases that it either slows down your PC or causes BSOD's. Windows Defender is good enough and of course, the best anti virus is yourself. Just watch what you are downloading, open emails etc...

Anti virus is only good if you have its definition database up to date and you know viruses are being created every single minute.

In addtion, Windows search indexing, restore points and other unnecessary processes running in the background.

What I always do is to make a backup image of the OS + installed applications using: Macrium Reflect Free and put it in another drive or an external drive so that if:

1. PC becomes unbootable
2. infected by virus/malware
3. slow down
4. etc.

Then I just restore from the backup and will be up in no time.

You might want to optimize your PC: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/37511-optimize-performance-windows-8-a.html

EDIT: In addition, download free version: Malwarebytes Anti-Malware - Protect, Detect & Remove Malware From Your PC and manually scan your PC once a week or so. Free version does not have real time protection so it will not effect the performance of the PC.

Have you been manually trimming your SSD's once in a while or letting windows do it automatically? IO ask because windows "should" do it once every 28 days or so, but I find doing it every 2 days better, plus I use the tool from the SSD software(in my case Samsung Magician) to do it. If you don't trim it often you'll get slow downs because of write amplification.

Thanks both
Cliff S: Interesting point - I keep thinking it is indeed the SSDs causing the issue because if CPU was being maxed out, I'd see it hopefully in task manager but more to the point, the fans would be going nuts. This is not the case - nor is memory and even to touch, memory is fairly cool.

I have just checked and indeed they were last run 27 days ago, I have just "optimized" so will check performance in the next hour or so of use.

Topguncdp: Agree although I guess it's a case of can you still be a little not careful no matter how hard you try? I am extremely careful in what I do online and even downloads are tested in a self-enclosed VM with no access to the laptop however I still worry :- )
Happy to uninstall and test if you advise it - defender can be place.
I guess the advantages of Avast over Defender is the outlook plug in which in the current day can get a fair bit of spam/attachments. Again, if you don't recognise - delete option works but it's a nice to have feature.

Slight update - I ran the optimize and also uninstalled Avast Premier... "seems" ok so far but time till tell over the next few days
Also disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome which has sped that up
Still does not feel as slick as the spec should be especially when comparing to a much lesser i5 8gb ram PC I use at work which is very snappy and with that one,I run SQL Server on the machine.

I'm still thinking it is SSD. a Blip I noticed yesterday when copying a 20kb pdf file from one folder to another one the same SSD... took about 30 seconds. Seemed to be thinking about it and then got stuck in.

I have noticed this too, I also sleep the computer when not in use. My theory: Sleeping the system when you are not using it results in the system not having any idle time to run maintenance stuff like defrag, file search indexing, etc. I found that if I just leave it running and walk away once in a while it can catch up on all that stuff and not have to run it when the system is in use. Just my take on the problem, but it seems to help for me.

aj84 said:

I'm still thinking it is SSD. a Blip I noticed yesterday when copying a 20kb pdf file from one folder to another one the same SSD... took about 30 seconds. Seemed to be thinking about it and then got stuck in.

Click to expand...

I would not blame SSD, I used the have the same problem with a classic HDD.
30 secs just to wait until the tiny file has moved or got deleted after confirmation.

That is the reason, why I have gone crazy about optimizing. As they say, it is not a bug, it is a feature, well Microsoft can keep its advanced maintenance. I have disabled pretty much everything automatic and I prefer to do it myself, not like it is needed to be done daily. Everything runs smoothly, not thanks to MS.

Thanks TarikuOkami,

Well last night I scanned a 30 page document which was done in segments (per page) of around 100kb each.
On trying to move them one folder to another, it was PAINFUL to say the least.
The first 10 moved instantly, then it got stuck at 49% and took almost 2 minutes before it resumed and just finished the rest in an instant.

Same thing happened when renaming the files ... first few were fine, on the 4th one, it just got stuck in a not responding state. Opening another explorer window and continuing renaming was fine but the old window was still stuck. About 2 minutes later, it kicked it and renamed the 4th file.

Really strange...and all this was happening on the same SSD (ie: I was copying from one my documents folder to another in the my documents folder on the same SSD)

You could try using Robocopy(I never used it myself, so I don't really know how to do it) it's supposed to be faster and better. It's a built in command line tool. For more information search in your browser. But as a side note there is also a GUI for it to download at Microsoft TechNet
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.11.utilityspotlight.aspx. And for examples on using the command line version: Robocopy and a Few Examples - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki

Maybe that can speed things up when you have a lot of & large files to copy.