My PC was running normally last night, but after waking it up, everything suddenly felt sluggish. It has an AMD Threadripper 1950X, an Nvidia RTX 2060 Ti, and Firefox is using most of the relatively low memory load. Task Manager shows roughly 5% CPU usage and 25% memory usage, with System Idle Process around 85%. Process Lasso reports 100% responsiveness, but basic actions such as approving an administrator prompt take one to two seconds. Garry's Mod also stutters even though my internet connection appears fine. I updated the graphics drivers, but that did not resolve the issue. System is using a surprisingly large number of threads, so I'm trying to figure out whether this is caused by a pending update, a drive problem, or something else. What should I check first?
3 Answers
Check the health and performance of your system drive. A failing or heavily throttled SSD can make Windows feel slow even when CPU and memory usage look normal. You can inspect its SMART status with a drive-health utility, check free space, and look in Task Manager to see whether disk usage or response time spikes during the lag.
First, do a full restart rather than just putting the computer to sleep or shutting it down with fast startup enabled. Also check Task Manager’s uptime—if it has been running for days or weeks, a restart can clear a stuck driver or system process.
Look for Windows or driver updates that installed overnight, then check Event Viewer or Task Manager for a process that keeps generating disk activity or an unusually high thread count. If a restart doesn’t help, temporarily close background utilities such as Process Lasso and test again so you can rule out software conflicts.
I hadn’t thought about checking the uptime. I’ll restart it fully and see whether that makes a difference.