System becomes extremely slow and unresponsive.
System becomes extremely slow and unresponsive.
Hey everyone, a few months back I acquired a decent used PC with minimal issues. But occasionally, when switching tabs out of a game (usually only every couple of days), my system drops to a massive slowdown—around 100,000 times slower. It mostly happens during game exits. You can watch a video on Vimeo showing the whole mess. Everything from the game onward feels extremely laggy. Usually I just restart it and things normalize, sometimes it fixes itself after a few minutes, though I don’t always have time for that. I haven’t found anything in Task Manager causing the problem, and temperatures stay well below 60°C on both GPU and CPU, so throttling shouldn’t be the issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Taskmanager appears in the clip around 00:25. Performance isn't close to 100%—the SSDs listed show 99% health, while others reach 100%. Since usage hasn’t been heavy, I didn’t detect any problematic apps or Windows issues.
Also no issues there. Just trying to get it working again. I ended the game, and it was really cold. None of my parts are at full capacity—my RAM is at 33%.
No one had a solution before. I tried lowering RAM to 3133 (or so) below XMP, assuming it was an issue with RAM. It didn’t help and temperatures stayed around 50°C max. Later, after about 40-50 seconds, the problem disappeared and everything worked again. Edit: 15 minutes later, I pressed the Windows key on my keyboard to exit the game and it froze again—still no lag, no overheating, no high usage on any part. Still needs a restart.
It occurred once more and I managed to run a HWInfo64 LOG file. The unexpected slowdown appeared around 13:09:15 (1pm) when exiting the game, disappeared by itself by about 13:10:05, lasting roughly 50 seconds. No obvious issues were visible there. Could anyone analyze the data and confirm anything unusual? Results.csv
Consider checking startup apps and disabling unnecessary programs that won’t open automatically. (Avoid turning off essentials like audio drivers unless confirmed needed.) Have you installed any anti-malware solutions? Also, review Task Manager under Processes to see which RAM-heavy process is active, and run Malwarebytes for a full system scan.