Urgent: Computer Suddenly Extremely Laggy - Windows and Games

[starklet]

Hi,
So my computer froze 2 days ago for no reason and required me to restart it with the power button. After this, my computer has started to become more and more laggy since then and now even typing this thread is laggy (the letters don't appear when i type them and takes a second for them to appear on-screen). Games like league of legends, i used to cap at 120 on highest settings and now i put to low and don't even get 20 fps. All of windows is laggy, programs takes forever to open, scrolling down on Google Chrome is laggy and slow, Clicking on webpages takes longer than usual. Even dragging a box on windows desktop has lag (the box doesn't follow the mouse directly and is trailing behind it a second or two.

I'm pretty gutted because i spent a lot of money on this computer and i might have to just by a new fresh system.
Also, my HDD storage drive makes a very strange rumbling/gritty sound at the same time almost slightly vibrating the computer whenever i boot up my computer or things are loading off it. I can really describe the sound but i guess i could record it and upload it somewhere if u want to hear it for yourself.

I have scanned my computer with avg and malware bytes and nothing has come up so i believe that takes a virus out of the question. I also run both malware-bytes and anti-exploit both on premium.

Lastly, This might not have any insight into the situation, But the Hard Drive i use as a storage drive for all my picture, vast majority of games, videos ect has a loose sata connection when i installed it into my system. The sata connector didnt seem to "Click" into place just sit there fairly loosly. This may not be an issue as things install onto it correctly and it all shows up in windows properly.

System:
CPU amd fx 8350 stock clock and arctic cooler freezer 13
GPU Nvidea GTX 770 4GB Twin Frozr
RAM 8GB 833Mhz
SSD Samsung EVO 120GB Boot Drive
HDD 2TB WD Black Storage Drive (The Sata Connector seemed Loose/broken).
My motherboard was some cheap £50 one when i first built my system, around 3 years old.

Could it be my motherboard at all that is not connecting everything together properly? My headset keeps cutting out and losing all sound from it for no reason at all and doesn't work until it decides to work again. This my be drivers or a dodgy headset because i have had it a while but i am thinking of getting a new one anyway.

If there is anymore information you need, just let me know and i will see what i can do. I dont mind upgrading my motherboard, CPU and RAM because all them parts in my computer are the oldest and i feel like the change to skylake is a good time.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Sneezer]

It could be several issues but my guess at this point is either your RAM, hard drive, or CPU.

The storage drives shouldn't cause this issue. Your SSD should also not cause this issue - it would just stop working for you all together while an HDD storing your OS could do this but that's not the case here.

Your CPU or RAM could be overloaded with some process or service gobbling resources. Check your task manager and look at the percentage of each that are being used. If one or both is full, that's good because it's a software issue and relatively cheap and issue to fix.

If that's not the case, your CPU or RAM could be going bad. I'd try a benchmark test of the CPU and RAM to confirm which (if either) is causing the bottleneck.

It could be your video card as well but I'd try the tests above first. If you have onboard video, I'd try removing your video card and using the onboard to see if that clears up the problems.

 

[starklet]

It could be several issues but my guess at this point is either your RAM, hard drive, or CPU.

The storage drives shouldn't cause this issue. Your SSD should also not cause this issue - it would just stop working for you all together while an HDD storing your OS could do this but that's not the case here.

Your CPU or RAM could be overloaded with some process or service gobbling resources. Check your task manager and look at the percentage of each that are being used. If one or both is full, that's good because it's a software issue and relatively cheap and issue to fix.

If that's not the case, your CPU or RAM could be going bad. I'd try a benchmark test of the CPU and RAM to confirm which (if either) is causing the bottleneck.

It could be your video card as well but I'd try the tests above first. If you have onboard video, I'd try removing your video card and using the onboard to see if that clears up the problems.

Hi There and thanks for your suggestions.

When i was scanning my computer with both avg and malwarebytes, the cpu usage was extremely high (95%). However it has seemed to calm down now back to normal.
https://gyazo.com/e8a8dcab93a249b938b04b17c817e22f
https://gyazo.com/ef2f79930841ba3f24cb9c76ea017b4d
^ These do seem a little higher than normal but are still not strangely high which is good.

I do use a GPU and will try to unplug it from my system and see how my fps is without the GPU. Obviousdly i wont get as much but if i am still running on 10 fps then i don't believe it will be the GPU.

Where can i benchmark my RAM if that is alright me asking. I do have 3D Mark Benchmark on steam which i can use for my CPU. When i get the results for them, how do i know what to look for which shows faults in either of these parts?

Thanks for your time.

 

[Sneezer]

I do use a GPU and will try to unplug it from my system and see how my fps is without the GPU. Obviousdly i wont get as much but if i am still running on 10 fps then i don't believe it will be the GPU.

Ya, it will basically just help eliminate some possibilities. You may still get low framerates but the slow typing shouldn't be a problem at all. That's the part that stuck out to me the most.

Where can i benchmark my RAM if that is alright me asking. I do have 3D Mark Benchmark on steam which i can use for my CPU. When i get the results for them, how do i know what to look for which shows faults in either of these parts?

Novabench is a great and 100% free benchmarking software I use. They say free and really mean it. I'm not 100% sure but I think you can specify what you want to benchmark you want to run so that you don't have to run benchmarks on your CPU, GPU, etc.
https://novabench.com/download.php

It's also the score system used by this website where you can compare the score you get.
http://www.memorybenchmark.net/

They have great benchmark data at that website for different components. Their main website is:
http://www.passmark.com/index.html

Thanks for your time.

No problem! Happy to help. Hopefully it's something easy to isolate and fix.

 

[starklet]

I do use a GPU and will try to unplug it from my system and see how my fps is without the GPU. Obviousdly i wont get as much but if i am still running on 10 fps then i don't believe it will be the GPU.

Ya, it will basically just help eliminate some possibilities. You may still get low framerates but the slow typing shouldn't be a problem at all. That's the part that stuck out to me the most.

Where can i benchmark my RAM if that is alright me asking. I do have 3D Mark Benchmark on steam which i can use for my CPU. When i get the results for them, how do i know what to look for which shows faults in either of these parts?

Novabench is a great and 100% free benchmarking software I use. They say free and really mean it. I'm not 100% sure but I think you can specify what you want to benchmark you want to run so that you don't have to run benchmarks on your CPU, GPU, etc.
https://novabench.com/download.php

It's also the score system used by this website where you can compare the score you get.
http://www.memorybenchmark.net/

They have great benchmark data at that website for different components. Their main website is:
http://www.passmark.com/index.html

Thanks for your time.

No problem! Happy to help. Hopefully it's something easy to isolate and fix.

Hi again,

I completed all tests on the nova-bench software and these where my results: https://gyazo.com/3ecf21f931f1c8c0a7de81e95428ab57

I also tried removing my GPU however my motherboard has absolutely no video ports (e.g. HDMI, VGA etc). So i cant test my PC without my video card installed and i have no others to try instead sadly. Is there any sort of software that checks for GPU problems?

I thought i would also add that when i turn my computer on, after logging in (windows 10) and windows starts loading desktop, it takes forever for all the little icons to load on task-bar along with the time and date in the bottom right. Furthermore, i can no longer click the bottom left windows button which allows you to navigate through the pc (if you understand what i mean). I press it and literally nothing happens or comes up. I don't know if this is a hardware, software or even a virus issue. I also downloaded superantispyware and scanned my computer with that. It only found 72 tracking cookies, however my computer is still no better (if not worse).

I unplugged my other 2 monitors to see if they where lagging my PC because i had an issue with this a while ago which made my computer lose all its performance when i had two or more monitors plugged in.

The typing isn't currently lagging but things like scrolling up to find the correct spelling, dragging windows around desktop, loading new tabs and web pages are all lagging still.

Shall i try a different keyboard and uninstall all my headset drivers because i may be wrong, but they could be lagging my computer out if they are not correctly working. I thought i may as well try so i will let you know how it goes without them.

When i load into games like League of legends if you are familiar with this, i am usually without fail one of the first to load into the game, due to my LoL files are loaded onto my SSD. However, it takes me foreverrrr to load into the game, usually one of the last to load now. I thought i would tell you this to see if that helps diagnose what the issue is.

Thanks for reading and sorry for all the long paragraphs.

Starklet

 

[zer0c00l587]

I'm gonna say windows 10 is the culprit, too many having issues with this OS, its buggy and if hardware is faulty it will harder narrowing down the issue because of this.

However Sneezer's suggestions are excellent and should be followed properly but im saying keep in mind instability of windows 10 while trouble shooting. My guess is to try your gpu in a friends pc to rule out failure or confirm it.

 

[starklet]

I'm gonna say windows 10 is the culprit, too many having issues with this OS, its buggy and if hardware is faulty it will harder narrowing down the issue because of this.

However Sneezer's suggestions are excellent and should be followed properly but im saying keep in mind instability of windows 10 while trouble shooting. My guess is to try your gpu in a friends pc to rule out failure or confirm it.

Hi,
Thanks for the information about Windows 10. After following the suggestions my computer carried on being slow. Like I said above, I removed the RAM, cleaned off the sticks and cleaned out the RAM slots. This fixed the issue for around 24 hours until the PC went back to slow functioning. I decided to remove the RAM, and put the two sticks in the other two parallel RAM slots which haven't been used before and this seemed to fix the issue. Possibly, faulty RAM slots on the motherboard or poor RAM connectors in the slots seemed to be the issue.
Furthermore, I removed GPU, cleaned out the PCI connector on mobo, and took off fans to clean out heatsink and chipset.
If anyone has this issue, maybe try what I have stated above and also follow sneezers suggestions and hopefully it will also fix the issue.
I also reinstalled Windows before removing hardware and it didn't solve the issue, if anyone is interested. This ruled out possible malware or OS problems. My OS didn't remove my old windows installation after 1 month of using Windows 10 (I am using a legit copy of Windows). I removed it to make sure there was no coinciding issues between the two different OS's.
Again, thanks for all the suggestions and input from everyone.
- Starklet