I don't know what is left to try.
- raised pagefile to recommended values
- scanned for malware/viruses
- cpu/gpu usage normal
- did windows built-in performance and memory diagnostics - no problems
- did CCleanup
- Made sure startup doesn't run anything out of the ordinary
Windows is very sluggish. Everything takes forever to start. It feels like instead of an i7, 16gb ram, I have a DOS-era pc.
I had that same issue before and it seemed to go away for a while when I reinstalled it all from scratch. One week later its back in full-force.
I did have an issue one time when I ran Dell Diagnostics, the PC Doctor complained about low memory and having to close some apps to initialize the scan but it made no sense to me because while that prompt was hanging, the taskbar showed memory utilization was normal and even windows performance said there are no problems so I suspect the Dell application itself simply malfunctioned or something because I have no other explanation to this.
Anyone?
Having an Alienware myself, a bit an older model, I can attest that you shouldn't be having sluggish performance.
However, you stated it returned after a fresh install. That leads me to either something you've installed or a setting you altered. What kind of security software are you running and are you doing any tweaks with software or otherwise?
No security software until after the problems started. I play MMOs a lot that install their online protection systems prior to launching. Not sure if these things do anything, but I honestly can't think of anything else since I don't tend to install unnecessary applications at all.Having an Alienware myself, a bit an older model, I can attest that you shouldn't be having sluggish performance.
However, you stated it returned after a fresh install. That leads me to either something you've installed or a setting you altered. What kind of security software are you running and are you doing any tweaks with software or otherwise?
Well, it does sound like something that is getting changed after the fresh install. That kind of behaviour.
What MMO's are you playing? I play a few top tier MMO's and none of them install any "online protection systems" prior to launching. Where did you download these games from?
I would guess a driver's issue. Since CPU/GPU seem fine, most likely HDD related driver.
I would uninstall SATA driver or SSD driver and restart for testing.
Try to check drivers with Driver Easy Free.
I would first check that you have the genuine chipset drivers for your motherboard, and not generic Microsoft drivers installed. Go to the windowssh blog Drivers and Hardware forum and the sticky threads at the top for links.
Your Pagefile - what size have you increased it to? Bigger is not always better, especially when you have plenty if available RAM.
Is it now fragmented and by how much? A large, fragmented pagefile on a single drive volume is much less efficient than having several smaller pagefiles on different drives, or better, different physical disks.
See
Learn Best Practices for Optimizing the Virtual Memory Configuration
(the systempropertiesadvanced tip is very handy)
and
for some tips.
With 16 GB RAM, and some free disk space, it is easy to defragment your page file - you need a second partition - just set the pagefile on the current drive to zero, and set a new pagefile on another partition to a 4GB. Reboot and perform a boot-time defragmentation of your boot drive and then set a small Pagefile of 1GB, and reduce the second pagefile to 3 GB.
Unless you are handling huge amounts of data routinely, the pagefile is there to provide storage for a memory dump in case your machine BSODs - if you don't BSOD regularly, 4GB will usually be fine with your 16GB of RAM
A good boot time defragmenter is supplied with Puran Utilities - Optimize your PC for best performance
A fragmented pagefile would not account for these issues. Nor having a pagefile too big would account for these issues.
I didn't say they were, but neither situation would help performance in an already ailing machine. Many little tweaks like this, like messing with automatically optimized system settings, can make a sick PC a lot sicker.
First make sure the chipset is being addressed properly with the correct drivers, (which are not indicated as warnings in Device Manager) and then any other driver issues that doappear in Device Manager, and progress onto evidence of processes being active or overactive when they shouldn't be in Task Manager, small steps at a time.
There's also non-obvious things like Windows Settings, System, Notifications, and turning them off, and Control Panel, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings, and unchecking Automatically detect settings, which can cause delays in some browsers based on the Chrome WebKit engine and Blink... and the list goes on
