Question Brand-new laptop is super slow

[SputzNiz]

Hi, everyone. My girlfriend bought an ASUS ZenBook Q425MA laptop 3 days ago. It's got 16 gigs of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB SSD and the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H SoC. The issue she's facing is that it is REALLY slow. The CPU usage is constantly in the high 70% (which is presumably what's causing it to be slow, of course) and it's always things like Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation or Desktop Windows Manager taking up 10-15% of the CPU. I'm aware of what those services are and what function they provide. When she's using Discord, it uses up to 25% of her CPU. Point being, even when there's no relatively demanding application running, her CPU usage is always above 75%. Even Task Manager when it's running can use up to 25% of the CPU. I'm not sure if this is a thing with the Intel Core Ultra series where it wants to use as much of the CPU as possible (similar to how unused RAM is wasted RAM) but it's troublesome.

We've updated the drivers and want to play It Takes Two on her laptop. That's where we run into another issue. Steam shows that she's playing the game and in Task Manager, it starts using up ~90% of her CPU but nothing is ever shown on screen. The last time she ran it, it showed that it was in a Suspended state and still using 75% of her CPU. The first time she ran it, her laptop got a grey screen (could still see the cursor) and that resulted in 3 hours of troubleshooting where it was painfully slow and everything would take 15-20 minutes to load, including the taskbar itself and we had to force shutdown. When she runs it, everything becomes super slow, she can't hear me anymore on Discord and everything is a pain to access. All this while nothing's shown on screen and with the game taking up 90% of the CPU

We've tried a wide number of fixes (short of a complete reinstall of Windows on a brand-new laptop). Any possible ideas what's causing this? I'm sure we'll have to end up doing a clean reset of Windows but if there's one or two more strategies available as a sort of last reprieve, that'd be nice. Thanks x

 

[LordVile]

Hi, everyone. My girlfriend bought an ASUS ZenBook Q425MA laptop 3 days ago. It's got 16 gigs of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB SSD and the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H SoC. The issue she's facing is that it is REALLY slow. The CPU usage is constantly in the high 70% (which is presumably what's causing it to be slow, of course) and it's always things like Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation or Desktop Windows Manager taking up 10-15% of the CPU. I'm aware of what those services are and what function they provide. When she's using Discord, it uses up to 25% of her CPU. Point being, even when there's no relatively demanding application running, her CPU usage is always above 75%. Even Task Manager when it's running can use up to 25% of the CPU. I'm not sure if this is a thing with the Intel Core Ultra series where it wants to use as much of the CPU as possible (similar to how unused RAM is wasted RAM) but it's troublesome.

We've updated the drivers and want to play It Takes Two on her laptop. That's where we run into another issue. Steam shows that she's playing the game and in Task Manager, it starts using up ~90% of her CPU but nothing is ever shown on screen. The last time she ran it, it showed that it was in a Suspended state and still using 75% of her CPU. The first time she ran it, her laptop got a grey screen (could still see the cursor) and that resulted in 3 hours of troubleshooting where it was painfully slow and everything would take 15-20 minutes to load, including the taskbar itself and we had to force shutdown. When she runs it, everything becomes super slow, she can't hear me anymore on Discord and everything is a pain to access. All this while nothing's shown on screen and with the game taking up 90% of the CPU

We've tried a wide number of fixes (short of a complete reinstall of Windows on a brand-new laptop). Any possible ideas what's causing this? I'm sure we'll have to end up doing a clean reset of Windows but if there's one or two more strategies available as a sort of last reprieve, that'd be nice. Thanks x

Have you removed all of the bloatware? Also how long have you had it? The the system could be indexing, I know this causes a performance hit on Apple devices when you first get it

 

[SputzNiz]

Update: We went into the Performance tab in Task Manager and under CPU, it showed only 1 out of a total of 16 cores which struck us as odd. Device Manager showed all 16 cores and so we went into MSCONFIG -> Boot -> Advanced -> Uncheck "Number of Processors" and then restarted. That fixed the problem and it's been running smooth since, both in normal tasks and gaming. Genuinely let out a belly-laugh when I realized it was something as trivial as this.

 

[SputzNiz]

T

Have you removed all of the bloatware? Also how long have you had it? The the system could be indexing, I know this causes a performance hit on Apple devices when you first get it

Thanks for your reply. I posted an update with what fixed it for us! But regardless, to answer your query, we removed all bloatware when we first booted it up and she's had it 3 days!