Railworks America

I know this is technically solved. But I did notice that last week, the PC was taking over 10 minutes to load, and wouldn't even run TS20XX at all, nor some other Steam games. Skyrim ran ok initially. But then started lagging badly. On occasions, it took 15-30 minutes just to get to the desktop screen at startup.

It was at the point where I was prepared to take it to a techie. At one point, almost all text in the entire OS was invisible, excluding the text engraved in some games. I had to navigate by memory.

Then the next day, it applied some update and all the issues seemed to have suddenly turned nonexistent excluding the occasional lagginess from an aging component.

I don't even understand how MS can create an operation system that has the potential to behave this badly. As someone who doesn't really understand IT that well, what magic would have been applied by the update?

Time to upgrade your computer. I use to run an Intel i5 2500K CPU and a 1060 GPU and it use to take 5 mins to completely boot up. I have since upgraded back in December to an Intel 10600K but still running the same GPU and now the computer boots up in about 30 seconds. See below for complete specs.

Also enable fast start up if available and run your OS on a SSD or preferably an M.2 drive.

Yes, I forgot to mention that I'm now running my OS off of an SSD. On my old computer, I was using an HD.

Any tips that will improve performance are welcome. I think some of the specs are in the sig. I have been using internal HDDs ever since I was in my teens, and strongly prefer them. I think it's just an issue with the OS. But wouldn't have a clue as to what is the exact cause.

The comments in the post are essentially 'A lapse in regular updates nearly caused a PC crisis. The update fixed it. Why would this be the case?' There are no major performance issues currently, except for the PC being slow when it loads the desktop, and occasional freezing. Common with Windows teN(ightmare).

SAR704 wrote:Any tips that will improve performance are welcome. I think some of the specs are in the sig. I have been using internal HDDs ever since I was in my teens, and strongly prefer them. I think it's just an issue with the OS. But wouldn't have a clue as to what is the exact cause.

The comments in the post are essentially 'A lapse in regular updates nearly caused a PC crisis. The update fixed it. Why would this be the case?' There are no major performance issues currently, except for the PC being slow when it loads the desktop, and occasional freezing. Common with Windows teN(ightmare).

Slow loading to desktop is usually tied to how many programs are loaded at bootup. They can be found in the Task Manager under Startup. The random freezing could possibly be back ground processes maxing out available resources. These can be found in the task manger under processes. It will show you what programs are using the most available resources at the current time in a percentage under the resource, be it Ram, CPU, graphics, HDD, etc. Hope this helps. There are a few websites that explain how to optimize Windows 10 for better performance. I suggest looking into one of those too.
Keep in mind that a SATA3 HDD at 7200 RPM will max out at about 90MB/s, A SATA3 SSD is about 560MB/s, and a PCIE M.2 drive is about 2,000MB/s. So load times will definitely be effected by these speeds. I'm guessing if you look at the resource manager your HDD is your bottleneck. Just a past experience guess.

It might be worth running the Windows diagnostic tests as they can fix a lot of OS issues.
Just a note fast startup can conversely/perversely slow down the Windows start up!!

Run the following windows diagnostics:
Exactly in order from a cmd (admin) prompt
sfc /scannow
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
Repeat until all errors fixed and then run
sfc /scannow again following the above until no errors recorded
dxdiag
chkdsk /f
Check the windows update history to see if any update failed.

Other windows diagnostics include: (OPTIONAL)
Check Device Manager and fix any yellow exclamation marks errors, plus ensure for all items Power Management is NOT set to turn off a device if idle.
Advanced Check unlikely - Check Task Scheduler to see if any windows process may be causing the freeze