Windows 11 suddenly becomes very slow and starts acting strangely.
Windows 11 suddenly becomes very slow and starts acting strangely.
Hello! I've been assembling PCs for more than two decades and have always managed to fix problems I encountered. Recently, my newest build suddenly started acting oddly... I was playing a game like FTL and everything froze. When I interacted with the system or moved windows, it would take over 30 seconds to respond. Getting into Task Manager was slow too—even though nothing seemed wrong at first. The machine ran extremely sluggishly: fans were barely spinning, SSDs showed zero usage, RAM was under 12%, and the CPU hovered near idle. Running a 13900K with an RTX4090 and fast Corsair RAM didn’t help much; I tried lowering the clock speeds but it still didn’t improve things. I’ve never seen anything like this before, even during troubleshooting. I checked forums and found similar issues—someone had moved from a 12900K to a 13900K and got stuck in a loop because ASUS hadn’t released updated Intel RAID drivers for that board yet. I thought I’d give it another try before giving up. Thanks for the help!
Download the Windows 10 ISO file from Microsoft's official website.
Checking RAM is a good idea now that it’s become more common. The setup was made in October/November 2022 with the 13900k and RTX4090. It has performed well until about last month.
It's tough to manage when things are slow—every move on the machine takes anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes. But once it starts again, I'll try. It feels odd, almost as if nothing is actually running. Temperatures are low, fans are near their limits, and performance seems stuck. In Task Manager, nothing suggests anything is active. It looks like something is using the CPU, NVMe drives, or RAM, but all signs point to smooth operation. Yet Windows feels stuck in a slowdown, almost like time is moving differently. I can't even move a window with the mouse instantly; it takes minutes for changes to show. This is completely unusual.