Ask HN: Why is windows 10 atrociously slow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is windows 10 atrociously slow?

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I have been wrestling with windows for decades, but recently windows 10 has become unbearably slow.

On a periodic basis, it becomes slow, after which I restart then wait for 10+min for windows to become responsive. Meanwhile during this period, everything I use email, firefox, Chrome, vscode all crawl to near useless.

While I am using HDD, instead of SSD, I consider such a performance problem an issue at windows side. Am I the only who suffers from it? Are there any registry hacks which can alleviate these problems?

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Symptoms could easily indicate a disk problem, rather than a Windows problem. You might have a defective sector that's difficult to read, in an important place in the filesystem that Windows often needs to read.

Typical consumer drives have long error timeouts, during which they will try and try and try again to read a defective sector. Assuming it eventually succeeds, no error gets flagged anywhere—not even in the SMART data.

>Symptoms could easily indicate a disk problem, rather than a Windows problem

Exactly what i was thinking, a HDD could be still really fast but heavy fragmentation, background scanning (antivirus or Automatic Maintenance(the task)) or a defect HDD could slow thing really down.

One way to spot disk-related issues: In Task Manager/Resource Monitor, watch the 'Disk Queue Length'. It should stay below 1.00 except in extreme circumstances such as running a backup.

How do you spot and fix disk problems apart from checking the Disk Queue Length as mentioned below?

Use event viewer, go to windows system logs and look for errors marked with disk tag and bad sector message.

This is the way I have pre-diagnoised my last three hdd way before problem surface.

SSDs have been out for a while and I'm guessing most developer workstations have them now and that's why a lot of software can suddenly be changed to have a disk heavy workload without a developer noticing.

You should upgrade - it'll be a considerable boost to your computer's speed and your productivity. SSDs are pretty cheap now.

You can stay using a HDD if you like but I don't think it's going to get better.

I second this. I have a 13 year old laptop. Windows 10 was very slow on it. I upgraded to an SSD and now it works great. No problems on my SSD desktop that is 8 years old too. You can even keep your files on the HDD if you want, but a small SSD for the OS and key applications can be a big improvement.

I see two main options. One you could upgrade to an SSD (or better HDD or RAID). Second is that you can install a lightweight OS like some Linux distros.

I am using all SSD in my laptop and still experience the symptoms described by OP.

The most-reliable relief I have found is not ideal -- I turn off Windows Defenders's REAL TIME protection. Builds for example take 40%-60% longer when this is enabled.

But this setting will get turned back on automatically by Windows at least once a day.

For a wildly different perspective: now that MS introduced WSL2 I no longer use pure Linux machines. Windows 10 + WSL2 is just quicker and more stable for me. I'm not saying it's perfect but I don't have video/audio/cam driver issues anymore.

I spend most of my time running VS Code and Terminal so results may vary of course. Started playing with the new Edge too...

I've been pretty pleased with MS recently. They're definitely not the crap factory they were when I was in school.

Someone in their C Suite just came.

My favorite is moving files between directories on an SSD. In case a file already exist you would expect "overwrite, cancel" window to disappear in single frame of animation after clicking cancel, not so much in Win10. Instead you get a nice animation with actual progress bar! A progress bar for _not moving a file_ that lasts at least 2 seconds.

I had this problem when I had it as a second OS. You know, Windows for gaming, Xubuntu for everything else. Apparently, if you only run it like once every other week, the updates and telemetry eat up all of your resources on startup.

I haven't found a software solution for it. Instead, I bought a separate PC and just keep it running.

Windows progressively enforcing wasteful add-ons, software and events that are out of user control and are impossible to disable.

Windows is designed for below average joe with too many extra protection layers against fool.

I still think $millions are to be made with proper cleanup/decrapify tools that are actively staying on top of the latest MSFT malices to keep user hands off the low level configurations.

I still remember my beloved Windows NT times where i can make a "race car" out of it.

Are you running out of RAM? Swapping onto an HDD is definitely slow. And is this disk actually performing at the expected 100-something MB/s? Alternatively Windows might be doing it even when you aren't running out of RAM. You could try disabling it altogether. Think it's called page file/paging on Windows. May also try disabling SuperFetch.

If that's the problem you want both more RAM and an SSD.

No, Ram is consistently below 50% usage. and cpu is below 10% usage. only HDD becomes 100% usage, and even task manager does not tell me which process is doing it.

Check this out: https://superuser.com/a/748891. Might help you find what's causing the disk usage.

I would strongly suggest upgrading to an SSD. I've been using Windows on SSD's with other data stored on larger HDD's for several years. Windows hangs in weird and wild ways when accessing data on HDD's now more than ever and as a result, I retired all my HDD's and replaced them with SSD's, now plugging them in only when I need specific data via USB.

> While I am using HDD, instead of SSD, I consider such a performance problem an issue at windows side. Am I the only who suffers from it?

If it makes you feel any better, I have a laptop with an SSD and still see slowness and sluggishness many a times. For me the main visible culprits are Windows Explorer, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Edge.

Run msconfig, take a look at all services and applications running in the background and disable those that seem unnecessary (research online on each one before disabling).

I've noticed Windows 10 being somewhat slow when it happens to be updating, or running some other kind of a periodic maintenance (or "maintenance") task.

Sometimes this manifests as sluggishness right or soon after a restart, especially if I haven't been running Windows in a while (dual-booting).

I echo the others who have suggested checking and seeing what's being run while the system seems slow. Of course if the system is almost entirely unresponsive, even doing that might be a bit of a struggle, but it might give clues.

I like to run `wpd` for clients[0]

It gets rid of the programs that obtrusively weigh down the system, as-well as removing a lot of cruft the typical user doesn't need. Disclaimer: it can break some things, but it's a small price to pay for a hardened system.

[0] https://wpd.app/

Disable everything with registry or scripts - Bing, telemetry, edge, store, groove music, etc

Change to VLC, irfann view, and Firefox.

Disable startup programs and delete any antivirus you have

Disabiling apps you don't use and replacing the ones you need with lighter options is good. I would not reccomend deleting or disabling antivirus except for very briefly to troubleshoot if that was the cause of the slowness. I think that could open you up to bigger problems in the future.

>disabling antivirus

That should always be the first point todo on a fresh windows.

I've been using windows for decades without antivirus software, and have never seen a virus on my system. Protip: Thoroughly vet the providers of any software you use, and do not open spam email.

True Words!! Antivirus works for already knows viruses and nothing else (and heating up the atmosphere) and makes Computers slow.

I think Windows Defender does some antivirus work too. Antiviruses themselves seem to do more harm than good now.

Try the performance monitor, often you can quickly spot some useless task like ‘memory compression/testing’ kicking in. You can disable these in the task scheduler.

have a look at what processes are running & consuming resources in task manager next time it happens.

from memory I think there's some kind of periodic job that causes a lot of disk IO (some kind of defender antivirus scan? Indexing for search? I forget exactly what). Disable it or adjust schedule. Noticed similar thing when trying to play games in windows 10 VM, every now and again game would lag up horribly due to some scheduled task that runs by default.

thanks, I will pay extra ttention to this.

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