I recently switched from a Mac to a Windows 10 pc and noticed many of the programs I used to use like Blender, Word, etc are having an increased lag before opening the program compared to the mac. I upgraded from 4gb ram to 12gb. What would cause an in increase lag time when opening programs on a pc?
Usually the wait time would be a second or two on a mac for some programs while on the pc it might be 5 seconds. Is there anything I can do to reduce the lag?
Your hard drive model, Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003, has a well documented firmware issue that results in very poor performance. Seagate has released an updated version that by all accounts resolves the issue. I don't know (obviously) if you have the latest firmware already or not, but the upgrade process will detect it if you do and inform you.
I'm guessing you have an older fw revision.
You can view the upgrade instructions and download the firmware from here
The most likely bottleneck is the HDD and an SSD will definitely address that.
Considering how cheap SSD drives are now, its probably cheaper in terms of time and effort to just try that first rather than debug the issue, as long as you are comfortable with reinstalling your system.
If you want to dig into it a bit, use the tool resmon which will show key resource usage in near real time. First stop any running programs that you can (i.e. programs launched as a user; not system services), then launch resmon (win+R; resmon), followed by launching a program that seems to be launching slowly.
Review the graphs shown by resmon to see which resource(s) are at or near 100% utilization - those are almost certainly your bottlenecks.
This is a first order approximation, there is a performance measurement capability built into windows called performance counters that would allow you to precisely account for the time spent 'starting' a program, and find the programs / services / resources that contribute to the overall delay. In this case I don't think you need to go that far; a quick check using resmon will almost certainly point you either at the hard drive (most likely) or the CPU.
It's very unlikely to fall into another resource category such as memory or network utilization, but anything is possible.
If you'd like some additional feedback on the 'reasonableness' of the delays you are seeing you will need to provide full specs on your win 10 PC, and ideally the Mac so that we can evaluate the relative performance of the two.
