Seeking advice regarding cause of very slow desktop.

JSmith

Hello,

I’m having trouble with a refurbished desktop that I bought from MicroCenter’s online store about 9 months ago. It is a Dell Optiplex 3040, running Windows 10 Pro, with ~256 GB of solid state hard drive, 8 GB of RAM, and an i5-6500 processor at 3.2GHz (I think it is dual-core or quad-core).

It worked great for the first 6-7 months, but about 1-2 months ago, I got concerned about some noticeable slowness in playing games and YT videos. I was also concerned about an idle RAM usage of about 30%, but later found out that that is fairly normal for Win10.

I had some concern for the slowness being a symptom of a virus since I had no other explanation. Out of an abundance of caution, and out of curiosity of going through the process, I performed a reset of the desktop. I didn’t save my files, programs, etc on the PC– it was a total reset.

But after this reset, the PC got even slower. Internet connectivity was quite slow when downloading the required Windows updates. When trying to watch YT videos, about 50% of the time the video would turn into a GIF.

Thus, I tried another reset. But yet again, after this 2nd reset, the PC seemed like it was even slower. Now when I turn it on, sometimes just opening File Explorer and typing are like watching a GIF because they are so slow and patchy.

Would appreciate some advice on the possible root causes and fixes.

P.S. – When the computer was working, I was using Bitdefender AntiVirus and using the desktop mostly for Steam / gaming, a little word processing, and news article / YT video browsing.

PowerSpec_MikeW

Greetings @JSmith,

What's your disk usage at when you're having these issues?

JSmith

Hello @TSMikeW,

My disk usage actually has seemed a little strange too. Several times, I've noticed the disk or the CPU performance working at or near 100%, but with oddly small objective values. For example, on startup just now, the desktop reported 100% disk usage for a moment or two, but the top two processes only reported 10-20 MB/s of speed with the other processes being vanishingly small. Is that normal?

Thanks.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@JSmith

Can be with an HDD vs an SSD. Try this:

Run command prompt as administrator. Type: chkdsk /r

Reboot and let disk repair run. See if the performance increases.

JSmith

Thank you. I have run the command and will see if I install/perform the different tasks I need now. Is there a way to see any analysis/results from the command? I didn't see anything when I logged in today.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@JSmith

Look at Event Viewer - Windows Logs - Applications. Look around the time the PC booted, source will be Wininit.