[SOLVED] All apps suddenly extremely slow, no CPU/disk/memory usage (idle) but programs don't respond/take forever to do anything

JackMacWindows

Prominent
Feb 25, 2019
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I've been having a bunch of trouble with my PC as of late. A few days ago my Windows installation seemed to just suddenly die on me, and now everything is running extremely slow. Just opening the start menu can take up to 30 seconds, and I've had Firefox take half an hour just to open a window. Upon looking at Task Manager, my CPU is still idle (under 10%), memory usage is under 25%, and no disk/network I/O is taking place. In Performance Monitor, there were very few page reads/writes, but I noticed that there were constantly thousands to hundreds of thousands of page faults occurring per second, but I couldn't find anything that could have been causing it, or if it was even a problem in the first place.

I've tried pretty much everything, including messing with page files, disabling services, running SFC, and even reinstalling Windows. The only other option I can see right now is to do a full clean install, but I really want to avoid that as much as possible since I have a bunch of stuff installed that will take ages to reinstall. One thing to note is that my computer works fine in Safe Mode, so I suspect there's some faulty driver that needs to be removed, though I have no idea how to figure out which one is the culprit.

If anyone has any suggestions, please help me out as I'm now without a computer to game on while stuck at home. I'll send over any logs/system info that might be needed to diagnose this issue.

My system has an Intel Core i5 4690K with an AIO block (was overclocking before trying to debug), 16 GB of DDR3-1333, a GTX 970 with driver version 450.12, and an SSD/HDD with 240GB/1TB storage, respectively. I'm running Windows 10 2004 (Build 19041.172).
 
Solution
what motherboard do you have?

how did you reinstall windows?

if all the files you want to keep were on the hdd, it would still take a little while too reinstall things but if, say, one of the folders you don't want to dl again is a steam game library, you can re use those on new installs.

page faults are normal, although I am not sure what a reasonable number is.
If anyone has any suggestions, please help me out as I'm now without a computer to game on while stuck at home. I'll send over any logs/system info that might be needed to diagnose this issue.
its still working right? its just not responding

I would attempt to run https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_trial.php on your 2 drives and run any...

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
what motherboard do you have?

how did you reinstall windows?

if all the files you want to keep were on the hdd, it would still take a little while too reinstall things but if, say, one of the folders you don't want to dl again is a steam game library, you can re use those on new installs.

page faults are normal, although I am not sure what a reasonable number is.
If anyone has any suggestions, please help me out as I'm now without a computer to game on while stuck at home. I'll send over any logs/system info that might be needed to diagnose this issue.
its still working right? its just not responding

I would attempt to run https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_trial.php on your 2 drives and run any scans you can in the disk menu. Just see if perhaps one of the drives is the cause.
 
Solution