Windows 7 slowing down ?

[caffrey]

Has anyone had any reports of windows 7 machines starting to get really slow ? I've had a few reports in of machines being sluggish over the past month. At first I put this down to age, and when the OS was last installed (roughly 2.5 years ago) but I've had too many to be a coincidence. Symptoms can be long log in times (up to ten minutes) and sluggish behaviour on the desktop on various hardware configurations. I would put this down to some of the hardware with some PC's being very old with 2 gig of ram, but it's also happening on newish i5's with 4 gig of ram. I've solved it by putting a SSD in the machine and reinstalling which seems to do the trick - but just seems odd and it seems to be spreading, plus most staff won't raise issues.

I've not really investigated much into it as I've just put it down to old network / old hardware that I've been complaining about to get replaced and I was just wondering if anyone else has had similar behaviour. I've read some conspiracy's

online about this coming about with the windows 10 popups, as if Microsoft are forcing people to upgrade from 7 and making peoples PC's deliberately slow (tin foil hat time!)

[Steve21]

If it's up to 10 minutes have you tried the WMI patch? If Win7 machines are forced off a lot the WMI database corrupts and makes very slow logins until it's repaired.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/127591-whats-going.html#post1090726

 

Once it's installed, normally it'll be slow for one more login, and then next restart it'll resolve the issue if it was that

 

Steve

[caffrey]

Thanks,

 

Tried the hotfix and it said it wasn't applicable, may have been put into a roll up some time ?

[Arthur]

Alternative to @Steve21's suggestion...

 

winmgmt /verifyrepository

 

https://madvirtualizer.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/are-you-sure-you-need-to-rebuild-the-wmi-repository/

[caffrey]

Repository is showing as consistent , no errors in the event log.

[TIOAOA]

Has anyone had any reports of windows 7 machines starting to get really slow ? I've had a few reports in of machines being sluggish over the past month. At first I put this down to age, and when the OS was last installed (roughly 2.5 years ago) but I've had too many to be a coincidence. Symptoms can be long log in times (up to ten minutes) and sluggish behaviour on the desktop on various hardware configurations. I would put this down to some of the hardware with some PC's being very old with 2 gig of ram, but it's also happening on newish i5's with 4 gig of ram. I've solved it by putting a SSD in the machine and reinstalling which seems to do the trick - but just seems odd and it seems to be spreading)

 

 

Seeing similar issues here over the past week, all the usual things checked, AV, Malware etc and all seems clear. I'm left scratching my head.

I'm at a loss what to do next, don't really fancy re-prepping hundreds of PC's

[AJWhite1970]

We were having exactly the same conversation on Friday as we all feel Windows 7 isn't right at the moment even with SSD's and 4Gb of RAM, in the last couple of weeks it just feels sluggish. As we are migrating to Windows 10 in the summer not sure if it's worth spending time investigating fully or not. Will be interested to see what this thread throws up through

[caffrey]

It's made more difficult depending on the end user, some of the slowdown was possibly caused by update Wednesday and most are just accepting that the machines are slow due to age so it's hard to collate data. We won't be moving to windows 10 for a long while yet (I've not even started looking into it)

[TIOAOA]

I would prefer to fix the issue with our Win 7 machines than change O/S. I just can't put my finger on what the issue is. I'm seeing this on i5's with 8GB of RAM purchased less than a year ago so don't think its a hardware problem.

[sniffingmoose]

There are so many reasons a PC can run slow such as big roving profile causing slow logins. Malware or bloat ware running in the background, look what runs on start up.

 

It can take a lot of detective work, you can start with looking in task manager to see what is sapping the computers resources. I did this when I found brand new clean installation of windows 7 was running slow recently. On the new Windows 7 installation, Windows update just got stuck on checking for updates for hours and in addition the PC was running as slow as an old dog. I found an instance of Svhost.exe was using 99% of the CPU. Trouble is I did not know which DLL this instance of SVhost referred to. There can be multiple instances of svchost.exe running on your computer, with each instance containing different services. One instance of svchost.exe might host a single service for a program, and another instance might host several services related to Windows. You can use Process Explorer to view which services are running under each instance of svchost.exe. After more detective work I found that every new installation of Windows 7 will need a new version of that Windows Update Agent because the update list has got so big.

 

Downloaded and installed the March 2016 version of Windows Update Agent from Microsoft and the system ran fast plus there were 250 new updates were waiting to install.

 

So sorry no quick fixes I am afraid, it can be hours of detective work to sort out what's causing your problem.

 

 

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/949104

[cheesits]

As a shot in the dark is there a service called "Diagnostics Tracking Service" running on the PC's? I noticed this was significantly slowing down machines, once disabled everything worked well again.

[caffrey]

Thanks, but this just happened recently. I bump into random people in corridors and they always ask me has something changed as the PC's are running slower than they used to, might just be a big coincidence. I've checked task manager and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. It could even be a network issue.

Odd thing is, my PC running windows 8.1 with an ssd is fine and I don't receive my updates from WSUS, so I'm wondering if it's some recent update

[TIOAOA]

I don't receive my updates from WSUS, so I'm wondering if it's some recent update

 

I wondered the same - so I removed any updates from the last month on effected PCs and put them in a separate OU so they no longer receive WSUS updates, seems this morning thats not fixed it and the collection of PC's in this OU is getting larger

 

I'm starting to wonder if we have gremlins

[TIOAOA]

The plot thickens here.

 

PC's freshly imaged 2 weeks ago are experiencing this issue again, slow performance, slow to respond, typing text in and there is a significant delay as it slowly appears on the screen.

 

Any suggestions on what I could check as the cause for this type of behavior ?

[bon_clay]

Does this only happen in the mornings when the computers are first switched on and after a restart?

If it does applied this update which seems to have solved the problem https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3102810.

I think the March windows update agent would also fix the problem but I haven't fully tested it out yet. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3138612

[TIOAOA]

Does this only happen in the mornings when the computers are first switched on and after a restart?

 

Not entirely sure but at this point i'll try anything, thanks

[Duke5A]

When the machine is dragging what does Task Manager look like? If you see svchost.exe eating an enormous amount of RAM and CPU time then it is most likely Windows Updates. I saw this happen on multitudes of machines at work and at home. It was especially annoying when it happened to the TV computer while I was trying to get my nightly fix of 'House of Cards.' Netflix would stutter constantly.

 

It's typically resolved by installing the latest Windows Update client.

[CJS-90]

Perhaps it's a subconscious comparison to newer OS's such as Windows 10? It may be that there isn't a slow down as such, but if you're using other operating systems/Apple too, then comparatively they may be making the older/lower spec Windows 7 kit feel slower?

 

Just a thought...