I've been dealing with extremely frequent lag spikes on my 10-year-old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3541. The specs include 8 GB of RAM (with around 6.93 usable) and an AMD A6-6310 APU with Radeon R4 Graphics running at 1.80 GHz. The frustrating thing is, these lag spikes happen every 5-10 seconds regardless of if I'm using it heavily or just idling. The only time it seems to stop lagging is when I'm watching something fullscreen or when the laptop is booting up. It's really annoying, especially after getting used to this old potato machine. The strange part is that I don't experience these lags in Safe Mode. Can anyone help me fix this?
1 Answer
It sounds like you may want to start by checking for any crash dump files, which help in diagnosing issues. You can locate them in C:WindowsMinidump if you can boot normally. If you find any, zip them up and upload them to a file-sharing site. It's also useful to have multiple files for a better analysis. Just keep in mind, you may need to adjust your settings to create these dumps reliably in the future!
That's not a BSOD issue, it's just the normal loading screen you see during the "Please Wait" phase.