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I feel dumb asking this, being A+ certified and all that, but I'm not sure what to start at. So this problem has been getting progressively and progressively worse, and now it's to the point where using my computer is becoming a hassle. There's still some things for me to do, but I wanted to get the ball rolling here, since it's getting stupid now. I think it may be my hard drive, but I'm not so sure. Here is a quick summary of my specs:

Windows 7 64 bit

6 GB Ram

Intel i7 @ 2.3 GHz

HDD: 500 GB ST750LM022 HN-M750MBB

GPU: Nvidia 660M

So the problem is that I get massive slowdown very frequently. Opening programs, playing any modern games, even switching to a different process (like bringing steam into focus). Here's the reason I think it's a hard drive issue, every time I experience slowdown, I'm getting a massive spike on the page faults/sec graph, and the processes that are going non-responsive show anywhere from 15-30 page faults. I'm thinking my disk drive is slow in returning these requests from the RAM. Another reason is that it seems like opening a file explorer takes a long time to open and detect files.

There's some other issues I can think of.

Just for fun, I ran a registry scanner. It detected 464 issues, but I haven't looked into that yet, since I'm not sure if I should be taking it seriously, I know lots of registry cleaners just feed you whatever they think will make you satisfied, and I don't really want to tell it to fix it unless I know they're legit.

The other problem I can think of is that it's because my CPU is woefully slow. I think this may be part of my issue with games.

Anyway, here's what I plan to do tomorrow, if people think it's a good idea:

make a small ubuntu partition and attempt to boot from there, see if it has the same slowdown

run a pc benchmarker and see what it says.

Thanks for any help. I plan to get a completely new computer soon, but I'd like to use this for as long as I can.

EDIT: I ran a memory diagnostic, and there's no problems, but it's still using more memory than what I count. It's using 4.5x the amount. If I check the resource monitor, I count that it's reporting 1.5x the amount that I count.

Even in safe mode, it uses 1 GB

Also, still getting that nonresponsiveness and system pausing.

My memory usage suddenly went down to 30%, but I still have issues.

One thing I'm noticing is that it's taking a shockingly long time to close processes.

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    What does Task Manager/Process Manager tell you about memory usage? CPU usage?
    – oldmud0
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 3:03
  • chkdsk /R c: on the hdd and see if you have bad sectors. If you have a 500gb hdd you should upgrade to a 512gb ssd and get awesome speeds. Clearly if you need more hdd you would have upgraded by now. As oldmud0 asks Task manager and sort by CPU useage percentage and what is using the most.
    – cybernard
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 3:21
  • Are you running low on disk space in your C: drive? Trying running a disk clean up your C: drive and perform a disk defragmentation on it.
    – Ayan
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 3:23
  • oh right, so my cpu usage ranges between 0% and 30% (at intensive times, like when playing a game). The RAM is about 40% at system idle, and around 75%-85% on most intense games. Star Citizen goes at 90%, but star citizen has high ram cost. The ram does not change when there's slowdown. This is weird though. For example, I am at the recommended RAM for Cities Skylines. However, when I play it, it's at 85% ram, and runs poorly, even though it has only 2.5 GB working ram. Even at idle, 48% seems high, even when I count up the memory used.
    – Brian W
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 3:53
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    This looks like a faulty HDD. run this tool and look if you have SMART errors: crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 6:38

2 Answers 2

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I'm running crystal disk, the read error rate, reallocated sector counts, seek error and seek time, spin retry counts, are all above the threshhold, actually I think everything is above the threshold, but half of those thresholds are 0. Lots of other things seem bad, like 256 uncorrectable sector counts.

This indicates a completely broken hard drive. You should replace it as soon as possible. You should now buy a SSD to get a great performance improvement.

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  • Thank you for the link, my HDD has been acting up for a while, and it seemed like it would hold out, but the recent troubles, and the bad crystal disk report seems like it would indicate that it's on its last legs. I'm going to make a backup on my expansion drive overnight, and I'll start shopping for new options.
    – Brian W
    Commented Jun 28, 2015 at 3:11
  • hey, so I was listing the normalized values. The raw values are low.
    – Brian W
    Commented Jun 28, 2015 at 23:57
  • like 0 low. So is my disk not the issue?
    – Brian W
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 0:12
  • However, the write error rate is gigantic
    – Brian W
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 0:17
  • Seagate uses vendor-specific counts in their SMART readings, so whatever a regular SMART tool might say is probably totally off.
    – oldmud0
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 3:56
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A basic diagnostic step is to check out the Event Log and see if there are any clues as to what may be going wrong during the slowdown periods. To do this, open the "Event Viewer" application and look in the Application and System logs.

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  • Looking at the event log, it seems there's a lot of warnings about the maximum file size for startup trace things being reached, I get errors about that too Other errors as well, like application faults
    – Brian W
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 14:46
  • You should "research" (ie google search) the errors and warnings. Even sometimes the information entries are important. Unfortunately, sometimes errors/warnings are "normal", but most of the time they need some sort of attention. In your case, the application faults are clues. Are they the sames ones each time? Are they regular? Was it caused by some action you were doing? etc. This is detective work and can take some time to get to the bottom of. Sadly, it could be hardware like faulty RAM, but I'd put my money on software to start with.
    – Saulysw
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 15:08
  • Another thing I would do as a basic diagnostic is to run a CHKDSK on C (as already suggested by Cybernard) to make sure the directory structure is ok. I might also then run a malware/antivirus check too. I find Malwarebytes Antimalware (free) software pretty good, and Trend Housecall.
    – Saulysw
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 15:11
  • I have avast, but I'll run it's antimalware scan now. As for the errors, I can investigate those app fauts in detail.
    – Brian W
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 15:14
  • You may need to change the settings on your event logs so that they have more space and also automatically overwrite old entries. Right-click the log (eg "application") and get the properties. You may also have a bunch of things in the Windows Error Reporting, and it may be slowing down when things go wrong because it is saving a lot of info to the hard drive as a diagnostic. Check your WER settings and history (in the Control Panel\System and Security\Action Center)
    – Saulysw
    Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 15:20

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