Hello All,
I have an issue I hope you can help me with. My Acer Spin 3 (sp314-51) with Windows 10 suddenly became painfully slow a few months ago and is having display issues. I think these may have to do with the graphics card but I’m not so well versed in this stuff so can’t be sure. This used to be an incredibly fast computer, which I desperately need for working with video editing and my general research and teaching work. Now, it’s barely usable. There’s so many quirks I can no longer follow a lead to the culprit. I’m trying to exhaust my options before doing a full reinstall of Windows. There’s a new quirk happening which I describe at the bottom* of this post which I’m hoping someone recognizes.
The machine is less than 1.5 years old, and it’s always had an annoyingly loud fan. I read about this being an issue with the Spin 3. Thankfully, it didn’t used to come on too often and the laptop didn’t seem to be generating too much heat. Since this problem began, the loud fan runs about half the time. I thought maybe the low performance had to do with dust, but none seems to be visible.
I have done full scans for malware several times. Had a scan done at Staples as well, there’s nothing. They installed a PC tune-up program, but this doesn’t help and honestly seems like bloatware more than anything. The 250GB hard drive is not even half full.
I check the CPU usage regularly, and it’s almost always at 18%, with memory at 47%. I realize this is high, and sometimes the CPU usage goes down to a more stable number (3-5%) a few seconds after task manager is opened. Often, task manager is not responding. What seems to take up both CPU and memory is Chrome, which I regularly have open. I know how much of a CPU/memory guzzler multiple Chrome tabs can be, but I had never had an issue before because when I got the thing it was lightning fast.
Now, when the laptop is in extra slow mode (can’t seem to figure out what triggers this but it’s about 40% of the time), I can barely open file folders. I regularly have to restart Windows explorer. The icons on the left fail to load in explorer as well. I often cannot stream anything without video stopping every couple of seconds. Restarting the graphics driver doesn’t seem to help. Everything looks fine in device manager, but once during a manual search it had to update the graphics driver. I try to restart the computer regularly as well to keep things up to date.
*A new symptom which led me to post on this forum is when I browse from my computer to upload an attachment to an e-mail, or any file to any website, I get a 32-bit type pixelated menu. The browse menu is also nearly full-screen and can’t be moved. I’ll attached a screenshot if I can, where you can see the sharpness of the icons along the bottom bar for comparison.
Any help here is much appreciated. I know Acer’s reputation, but I’ve had several of them now and I expected a good many years out of this SSD laptop before a hardware issue. If it’s software, I’m a little lost as to what. Thanks for reading!
T
I have an issue I hope you can help me with. My Acer Spin 3 (sp314-51) with Windows 10 suddenly became painfully slow a few months ago and is having display issues. I think these may have to do with the graphics card but I’m not so well versed in this stuff so can’t be sure. This used to be an incredibly fast computer, which I desperately need for working with video editing and my general research and teaching work. Now, it’s barely usable. There’s so many quirks I can no longer follow a lead to the culprit. I’m trying to exhaust my options before doing a full reinstall of Windows. There’s a new quirk happening which I describe at the bottom* of this post which I’m hoping someone recognizes.
The machine is less than 1.5 years old, and it’s always had an annoyingly loud fan. I read about this being an issue with the Spin 3. Thankfully, it didn’t used to come on too often and the laptop didn’t seem to be generating too much heat. Since this problem began, the loud fan runs about half the time. I thought maybe the low performance had to do with dust, but none seems to be visible.
I have done full scans for malware several times. Had a scan done at Staples as well, there’s nothing. They installed a PC tune-up program, but this doesn’t help and honestly seems like bloatware more than anything. The 250GB hard drive is not even half full.
I check the CPU usage regularly, and it’s almost always at 18%, with memory at 47%. I realize this is high, and sometimes the CPU usage goes down to a more stable number (3-5%) a few seconds after task manager is opened. Often, task manager is not responding. What seems to take up both CPU and memory is Chrome, which I regularly have open. I know how much of a CPU/memory guzzler multiple Chrome tabs can be, but I had never had an issue before because when I got the thing it was lightning fast.
Now, when the laptop is in extra slow mode (can’t seem to figure out what triggers this but it’s about 40% of the time), I can barely open file folders. I regularly have to restart Windows explorer. The icons on the left fail to load in explorer as well. I often cannot stream anything without video stopping every couple of seconds. Restarting the graphics driver doesn’t seem to help. Everything looks fine in device manager, but once during a manual search it had to update the graphics driver. I try to restart the computer regularly as well to keep things up to date.
*A new symptom which led me to post on this forum is when I browse from my computer to upload an attachment to an e-mail, or any file to any website, I get a 32-bit type pixelated menu. The browse menu is also nearly full-screen and can’t be moved. I’ll attached a screenshot if I can, where you can see the sharpness of the icons along the bottom bar for comparison.
Any help here is much appreciated. I know Acer’s reputation, but I’ve had several of them now and I expected a good many years out of this SSD laptop before a hardware issue. If it’s software, I’m a little lost as to what. Thanks for reading!
T
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