Small issue with W8

[Nils]

Hi

I've got this small but annoying issue with windows 8. Sometimes when I want to launch a program say from the taskbar or the start menu, it seems like windows is not starting the program right away. Instead the turning wheel pointer shows up for a second or two but windows takes no action to launch the program. After that, it finally starts. If I launch it for a second time everything works fine and quickly. However if I don't use the application for let's say half and hour or so, the problem reoccurs: first launch is again held up.

This is not a big issue, I know, but it is a bit annoying since I have an SSD drive which is seriously bottlenecked by this. On W7 first launch took like a fraction of what it does now.

I hope someone can help me with this

Thanks!

 

[13thmonkey]

how much ram do you have, the second time is quicker as it has cached the data in ram.

 

[Nils]

6GB DDR3 1600. Don't think it has anything to do with that. Like I said, on W7 I didn't have the issue, you could hardly tell a cold start from a restart.
I think it has something to do with the system settings but I don't know which. Because I had the same version of W8 installed earlier on a HDD and no problem at all. However HDD vs SSD seems to have nothing to do with it because I have another PC at home with HDD and W8, same problem...

 

[johnbl]

-if you are launching metro style apps, windows will suspend and task switch them after 4 are started (if I remember correctly)

-if you are launching desktop apps I am not sure of the delay unless your system has been idle and your drive has been put into a low power state and takes time to wake up. if it takes too long it will have a disk reset error that will show up in the event logs.

windows 7 did not always put devices into low power states by default, window 8 does but many devices have issues that windows 8 exposes. Most often you end up having to update your BIOS and device drivers to get them to work correctly. (or disable low power states in the defective device in control panel to work around the issues)

very common for this to occur with SSD (with firmware from before windows 8 shipped) you might want to check your drive for firmware updates.
crystaldiskinfo.exe will show the firmware version and SMART data from your drive. Then you can google for firmware updates and see what fixes they have.

 

[Nils]

Thanks for the reply! There's a lot of stuff in your answer I didn't know yet.
But I think I found the problem. It seems to be due to my anti-virus program. If I disable it programs always startup immediately. So it looks like there's not much I can do about it.

 

[johnbl]

Thanks for the reply! There's a lot of stuff in your answer I didn't know yet.
But I think I found the problem. It seems to be due to my anti-virus program. If I disable it programs always startup immediately. So it looks like there's not much I can do about it.

that can make sense, lots of scanning will occur when the system is in a idle state, then you start something up and it will take a few moments for the background task to be suspended and stored while your new task is given control.

virus scanners will scan while idle, and windows 8 puts drive repairs and scans into a background queue that may be executed when the CPU is at less than 25% load.

 

[Nils]

Best answer selected by Nils.