Windows 10 experienced a sudden drastic slowdown, causing Explorer to freeze and programs to crash.
Windows 10 experienced a sudden drastic slowdown, causing Explorer to freeze and programs to crash.
I'm really upset and stuck. My PC was functioning perfectly a few days back. The specs are listed here at the end. I started playing Destiny 2 with nothing else running, and noticed it became extremely slow. I tried to restart to fix things, but the reboot took much longer—about 20 seconds to 15 minutes. Once it finally loaded, many app icons appeared as blank squares except for the shortcut, and after roughly ten minutes they started appearing. It felt like everything was loading painfully slowly until it finally showed up. The file explorer is also very slow, often giving a frozen or unresponsive message. I checked my Windows updates, and some failed or weren't installed properly. Restarting them only brought me back to around 5% and then froze completely. I ran scans, but Windows Defender and other checks kept failing. I did a Nvidia driver update recently, changed the XMP profile to automatic, reset BIOS defaults, and even cleared the explorer history. This helped a bit—certain games ran for a short time before crashing. Some menus or browsers not linked to Explorer stayed responsive, adding to the confusion. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but I might need more details. Could anyone help me figure out what might be causing this sudden issue? I also tried defragmenting the C drive and downloading Windows 11, but both attempts ended in failure. I’m leaning toward a reset now, though I’m worried it might leave me with problems. Thank you in advance for any advice or clues you can share.
Because of all the unnecessary programs, I wasn’t surprised at all… in fact, I’m doing a full reinstall now, not resetting anything. Avoid installing any software except Steam and Hwinfo64 if you really need them. You’ll have to remove everything until you understand what’s going on. If that doesn’t work either, consider a new hard drive—this sounds like faulty storage or memory to me.
I notice it seems to have appeared suddenly. Usually I avoid installing anything except games or software tied to my hardware like Nvidia or Razer. Most unknown programs feel like unnecessary bloat on the system. What do you think makes a full reinstall better than just resetting? Does resetting actually reinstall Windows? I’m not sure how to compare them properly—would launching Task Manager right after boot help? The biggest issue is the extremely slow reboot, making it hard to open anything quickly.
Yup, ctrl-shift-esc once the desktop/taskbar are up, since you say it takes minutes you should have time to see it... The SSD in my main machine had a similar issue recently where it went from the PC booting and launching all startup apps in <1min with "normal" fluctuating reported usage to taking 3-5mins pegged at 100%.
It showed no issues and performed well during new operations, so I thought the problem was with reading old static data that hadn't changed since installation—things like the OS or software that don't update. I checked some areas and noticed read speeds dropped below 20MB/s on sequential reads, especially on a PCIe4 drive designed for high throughput. After securely erasing it to reset all memory, then restoring the image, everything worked properly again.