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I have a Toshiba Satellite with a Core i7 processor. It has worked fine so far until one day it has slowed down to a crippling speed. Many simple tasks like searching, showing the popup of the notification area or even pressing Windows key can take 5-10 seconds to respond. After that it runs smoothly again until another minute or two.

I fired up Task Manager to see what is going on, and nothing is eating the CPU (I did check "show all users"). As a matter of fact Task Manager also freezes during the 5-10 seconds delay.

I'm thinking maybe is the HD insanely busy, but then I can't explain why I don't hear much activity of it, nor is it anywhere near full (25% used).

Can someone recommend tools that can record such abnormal activity? Could drivers be a problem? It was bought about 2 months ago, and it hasn't been reinstalled since.

karel
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SK.
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  • Use http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing/products/drive-monitor/ (free) and check your hard drive is OK – Dave Nov 22 '12 at 16:01

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Do you have anti-malware software installed? Some can be very agressive and scan every file, every time. Also, having more than one such tool can create issues. One one should be active. If not, both try and scan.

Do you have Skype installed and running? It can create issues if it becomes a "supernode" I ahve seen this several times and it really drags down the system.

Have you done a through malware scan?

Defrag the disk?

Any software recently installed or hardware changed?

Dave M
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  • I have MS Security Essentials, I tried excluding the Windows folder (for offline testing purposes), found nothing. I prefer to leave "Real Time Protection" on as it would always make a warning if I don't. Skype is off the whole time. I'll try the full scan, good idea. The defragmenter said 0% fragments, kind of makes sence because not much has been installed on it except a heavy game (League of Legends). Biggest HW change would be the use of a handwriting tablet for Photoshop, but as far as the testing goes it is unplugged the whole time. – SK. Nov 22 '12 at 15:40
  • Hey a League fan. Let's try to help this fellow friend here – Gutsygibbon Nov 22 '12 at 15:46
  • Haha, thanks. I was running full analyse but got stuck at a file (a data file from the Amnesia game, which I happily forgot that I used to play). I think I'll reinstall these, even though I highly doubt it will help. – SK. Nov 22 '12 at 16:55
  • I have read on http://superuser.com/questions/26862/how-do-i-troubleshoot-a-windows-7-freeze-or-slowness that drivers could also be the issue. Is this Windows Performance ANalysis Tool worth anything? Any other tools I could use to check drivers? – SK. Nov 22 '12 at 16:59
  • From scanning with chkdsk at boot, I see there is a HUGE amount of -unrecoverable- bad sectors. I now suspect it is bad manufacturing and will need to send it to repair and wait 4+ weeks before using my PC again. – SK. Nov 23 '12 at 06:39