I have recently encountered a problem with my computer that took me over a month of investigation to figure out. I first noticed it when I upgraded my old single core AMD to an Intel quad core system. When trying to play Starcraft 2 on the newer system, the game would run at half speed; units were slow in general, and the clock in timed missions were taking 2.5 seconds to count off 1 second. I originally thought that I had fixed the problem by changing display settings to max performance. I recently picked up SWTOR, and had no problems running it at first. After a recent Windows update, the problem came back and was affecting SWOR as well.
After checking all my settings, I noticed that the update had reset my power and display settings to default, so I changed them again but this time the problem remained. That's when I started noticing that the entire system seemed to be acting in slow motion, not just the afore mentioned games. After checking with Microsoft answers and following their cookie-cutter support advice, I came across a thread on an obscure forum about someone having a similar problem, only to discover that a USB mouse was the root cause. So, I unplugged all of my USB devices and re-booted. Lo and behold, Windows was lightning fast again, and the games are now running normally. I have ruled out my mouse as the culprit, and am suspecting a SD card reader I had plugged in as the cause.
How can a simple card reader cause the entire OS to slow down like this?
Note: the slow down never affected oled games like Diablo 2.
After checking all my settings, I noticed that the update had reset my power and display settings to default, so I changed them again but this time the problem remained. That's when I started noticing that the entire system seemed to be acting in slow motion, not just the afore mentioned games. After checking with Microsoft answers and following their cookie-cutter support advice, I came across a thread on an obscure forum about someone having a similar problem, only to discover that a USB mouse was the root cause. So, I unplugged all of my USB devices and re-booted. Lo and behold, Windows was lightning fast again, and the games are now running normally. I have ruled out my mouse as the culprit, and am suspecting a SD card reader I had plugged in as the cause.
How can a simple card reader cause the entire OS to slow down like this?
Note: the slow down never affected oled games like Diablo 2.