Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

I have an HP EliteBook with an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and an SSD that’s about 70% empty (only 30% space is being used). It runs the latest Windows 10 image from work and is slow as molasses. Almost every action I take, be it a mouse click or hitting a key or switching between applications, takes a few seconds or much longer. I thought it’s a McAfee issue, but the CPU usage is above 50% almost all the time and this usage is across many processes (whose names I don’t understand), not just McAfee.

Since it’s a work image of Windows, it has policies set to prevent me from changing many things.

Where do I even start troubleshooting this issue and finding the culprits? Is it just a CPU usage issue and/or some kind of I/O issue? I haven’t yet tried using something like Process Explorer (from the sysinternals tools) to get a clearer idea of what’s happening (though I’m not sure if that’d help).

I’m thinking of putting Linux on it as an alternative.

Any and all suggestions are welcome and appreciated.

McAfee intercepts every IO read/write afaik, which makes it horribly slow

Check out Bruce Dawson's blog, he works for Google and he writes articles on investigating slow application performance on Windows, e.g.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/

Over the last few years I’ve written over forty blog posts that discuss ETW/xperf profiling. I’ve done this because it’s one of the best profilers I’ve ever used, and it’s been woefully undersold and under documented by Microsoft. My goal has been to let people know about this tool, make it easier for developers and users to record ETW traces, and to make it as easy as possible for developers to analyze ETW traces. [..] The purpose of this page is to be a central hub that links to the ETW/xperf posts that are still relevant.

Some of my favorite blog posts are those that tell a tale of noticing some software that I use being slow, recording a trace, and figuring out the problem.

They go back a few years, he recently tweeted that Windows Performance Analyzer / ETW Trace Viewer is now available in the Microsoft Store - https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/106039652215040819...

In my experience on a similar configuration, most of the times such aliens is because of i/o bottleneck.

Antivirus, Windows app optimisations, and device manufacturers' softwares running at predefined schedules, choking the disk might be a problem.

You frontotemporal should check the process explorer next time you gave the issue. In the meantime, may be check the task scheduler to see if some heavy read write tasks are scheduled

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/

You could try swapping the ssd with a new one with a fresh install of windows or even try dual booting a fresh install of windows to see if it's a software issue after all.

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