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One of the computers I work on has been having performance problems: it just stops responding to input for a few seconds at a time (eg instead of smoothly scrolling with the mouse in Word wheel it'd scroll for a few seconds normally pause for a few seconds then fly down a few screens and repeat). After unsuccessfully trying to troubleshoot the system the admin decided to just rebuild it. The initial OS/Office load worked fine; but as he began adding my development tools (VS2015, Sql Server Management Studio, Eclipse) he said it started slowing down again and getting worse with each new install. This happened just by installing them, not when they were running. 
He's going to try throwing more hardware at it (I'm not complaining even though the baseline should be enough for what I need); but what could possibly be causing just having more software installed to bog the system down. Because of its use the system does have security/logging/etc settings turned up to 11 on the paranoia scale; but I can't imagine how that'd be hurt by having more stuff installed. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Do you have the problems in safe mode or clean boot?
Of the few things nowadays that can make the computer unresponsive, the harddrive and drivers are the ones that comes to mind.
<edit>and what Slacker mentioned, antivirus</edit>
modified 7-Mar-16 10:16am.
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IIRC he was screwing around in safe mode during one of the pre-wipe testing sessions.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Then I would run chkdsk /r over the night
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There was one running when I was in the lab a few days ago, I don't know what if anything it found; but since he didn't try swapping a new HDD I assume no errors were found.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Don't waste your time running chkdsk. Boot linux and run badblocks if you suspect the disk. Chkdsk is good for detecting filesystem errors, but is completely unable to notice bad media -- in my experience, by the time chkdsk detects a bad disk, its because the heads are quite literally glued to the platters.
To the OP, yes, just installing stuff can slow a computer down. It bulks the registry, and puts more things in it that the OS has to keep checking (e.g. class IDs), paths, etc. Also, these days, it's all the rage to install an updater service with your application that runs in the background all the time, even when the application isn't running. And don't forget the disk indexing. And.. was the computer physically disconnected from any and all networks during the install process? If not, MS might have been keeping the disk busy downloading updates in the background for you.. like Windows 10.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Since you mentioned overdoing it with the security...
I have seen application performance issues when more than one virus software is competing for supremacy - I would check this.
Also, if you don't have enough physical RAM on your graphics card itself, then this could also play into application performance, because the App is having a hard time rendering itself.
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Slacker007 wrote: I have seen application performance issues when more than one virus software is competing for supremacy - I would check this.
Nope. This's real hardening, not cargocult I have 27 antivirus programs and 17 firewalls, lets see them try to hack this BS.
Slacker007 wrote: Also, if you don't have enough physical RAM on your graphics card itself, then this could also play into application performance, because the App is having a hard time rendering itself.
Just installing more software *that isn't running* shouldn't affect the amount of vram any of the open applications are using.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Have you checked the basics like free disk space, your swap file size, disk activity and page faults? What's perf monitor say about the top CPU hogs?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Nowhere near all ram used so there shouldn't be any swapping and System Idle Processes was consistently above 90%. We've already checked all the usual suspects, the only difference between the base system and the system suddenly running like mud was installing a few widely used applications, but there was still lots of free disk space.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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To throw in another option: depends on the software you install. Quite a lot of things these days install a "preloader" Service app which runs in the background and makes the app look like it loads quickly. I've had a few cases where these can slug the machine.
And it's amazing what slowdown some browser extensions can cause: my bank tries to install "Trusteer Rapport" for security and that can really slug my machine, even if I'm not surfing... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I'm not sure if I've ever opened a browser on that laptop at all - no internet, no on network web server - so no real point. And if any of the three applications involved had anything like that going on I'm sure the lounge would be flooded with hatoraid about them.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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+1 for 'hatorade'. (<< 'ade' like gatorade, lemonade, etc...............).
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OriginalGriff wrote: my bank tries to install "Trusteer Rapport" for security and that can really slug my machine, even if I'm not surfing...
Yep, I had to uninstall that too when my bank kept nagging me to install it. Boy did it slow things down!
Now I just put up with the hassle of closing the dialog box each time I want to log into my account.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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It could be pixies. Check for empty bottles of Lamb Liniment lying around the back of the machine; a sure sign of the wee free men.
veni bibi saltavi
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Or it might be elves... Check with Granny Weatherwax 
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Spoiler:
Can't anymore, she passed away 
Young Geoffrey is now running her steading though.
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I/O!
Your computer may be a 12-core with 16 GB ram but if something is doing heavy I/O, you are toast.
This recently happened to me at home on my Win10 laptop.
It's an i7 with 8GB and runs very well -- normally.
However, Microsoft pushed an update when I opened the lid but you couldn't tell anything was happening. I looked at the disk utilization and it was at 100%
I ran a program I wrote which watches all disk I/O (I"ll soon be writing this up) and I learned that so many things were going on all around the disk it was crushed. I couldn't do anything but wait. I have snapshots of all the crap that was chipping away at the HD, killing I/O.
Feels Like A Virus
When that happens it feels like a virus.
Microsoft, your updates feel like a virus.
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Agreed. My box frequently runs like a three legged donkey and all because some upgrade is going on. Even the hyper fast SSDs are prone to maxing out when winupdate kicks in.
I also noticed VS can really slow things down. Something to do with devenv I believe.
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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Dan, I am gobsmacked: you have actually paired the term "computer software" with the (is the use adverbial, or, adjectival ?) word "normal" !
Any computer will appear to run more slowly if you use the word "normal;" I am not sure if this is related to quantum phenomena because, these days, I can only half-observe myself with the left-eye.
cheers, Bill
«In art as in science there is no delight without the detail ... Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all “general ideas” (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.» Vladimir Nabokov, commentary on translation of “Eugene Onegin.”
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Have you checked for traces of tachyons? It could be time dilation. It's working so fast that it gives the illusion of working very slowly.
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Maybe it's not software at all, but rather, the system may be running hot, especially as you've been installing software one after another. For one thing, the hard drive is getting a workout.
I've had a system with a dying video card that kept getting warmer and warmer and as it went along, it became more and more sluggish.
The CPU may be reaching thermal limits and slowing itself down until the temperature drops.
I have no idea - grasping at straws and throwing ideas at you.
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Not an unreasonable guess; but the initial performance fail was found by me a few weeks after the laptops were installed, so any thermal load from that should've been long dissipated (even by the crappy Dell coolers).
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Did you say "Laptop" ?
Before doing anything else, and despite any good reports from chkdsk, SMART etc., you need to swap out the hard drive, do an install and see if the problem is still there.
Laptop hard drives are notoriously poor (in all respects) and will generally slow down anyway as they age. System pauses typically arise from failing sectors that require several tries to read the data. Windows is too dumb to spot this as a potential failure and has never reported a significant SMART warning to anybody anywhere.
If the disk is an SSD (or a hybrid) you could be faced with one of the many dodgy firmware problems that plague even the most well-known makes.
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The problem is that you are using windows. No seriously, the linux/unix philosophy "everything is a file" conceives that files are data, the are read during execution. Only a small set of servers runs in a daemon. Developers for windows applications seems to not get that.
Try to install PDF viewer - oh, a new Adobe service.
Try to install word - oh, great, office background service.
Try to install a browser - oh, a background service?
I wonder in which version of Windows notepad and paint will include background service.
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