As there are a lot of technophile people around here, I want to share a question.
I run three notebooks which have practically the same hardware (lenovo X1 with an i7-8550U and the onboard graphics) for mobile use.
One of them is given to me for some project and is running in a protected environment under supervision of an administrator. This one is super stable and not a single bit laggy. I have that for three years now and it’s speedy fast like in the first days.
Now the other two, albeit having the same hardware, are sometimes so laggy that it’s hard to use them. The onboard graphics (intel UHD 620) is often loaded by 100%, even when just browsing the internet. Can’t even use it for a Teams meeting because it’s not continuously showing a video stream.
One of them two is running Windows 10, the other Windows 11 (the one I don’t own is running Windows 10). I only installed stuff like MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, in principle work applications and stuff, and am just starting to think wether it’s worth the effort to dig deeper or to just buy new hardware. If I had not the other notebook that’s still running so fast I would not share a second thought, but hell, that’s amazing.
I tried the typical settings like disabling most of the startup processes (startup from SSD is super fast as it should be), bought a cleaner suite that searches the registry and slow-down processes (did nothing that helped) and tried graphic settings and such things, but it’s not getting better. The bottleneck seems to be the onboard graphics unit that hits 100% load and then the system freezes until the process is finished. Impossible to even watch an embedded video or youtube. That’s crab.
I’d like to find out which process is slowing down the system or, even better, if anyone knows a solution / a software that really does a trick.
Is it possible that the GPU chip is running without thermal paste or broken fan?
Yes; Windows doesn’t really just slow down for no obvious reason, unlike mobile operating systems which do it for various weird power management reasons.
One thing which can slow down a Windows machine is a defective USB device. Another one is a hard disk (or SSD) which is nearly full, and then Windows will thrash the swapfile. Another one is a worn out SSD (they wear out much faster than hard disks if you do a lot of writing).
ivark wrote:
Is it possible that the GPU chip is running without thermal paste or broken fan?
Thanks for your feedback, also to @Peter, I didn’t consider any hardware issues so far…in fact the notebooks don’t get hot and, well, why should this break. Nothing obviously happened. SSD is nearly empty, 100 of 500 GB used, and used only for plain MS Office daily work and some surfin’.
But anyway, that opens up a can of worms for me that I don’t mean to eat up. Because this can evolve into a real time sinkhole if I was to track down what’s broken. I was hoping that anyone knew about some software that magically cleans up the system (as advertised by so many …. 
) but that really does something and here we go, no need to throw away stuff that in principle is fine (I try to be sensible with using out my stuff to limit pollution).
Well maybe I’ll do a last try and reset the system to see what happens.
Go into Control Panel / Programs and Features and uninstall everything not needed.
It is possible somebody installed some weird program on it.
Remove all AV software. Some antivirus software is horrible, especially with certain features enabled. I have removed Kaspersky AV from all machines for the obvious reason (Russian remote control / etc risk) but frankly all AV software is a) extremely intrusive b) rarely finds anything unless you visit p0rn and crack sites and even then it will find only really old viruses. I have no AV software on the Dell XPS13 I am typing this on. At work and at home I use Microsoft’s own AV (called something defender); that is on win7-64, and take various other precautions like using a 25 year old email client which does not support HTML emails 
We also do this to retain business emails since 1995 which has proved to be an absolutely brilliant move.
One reason AV software rarely finds anything is that all the clever viruses disable it. So the only AV software which has a chance of working if the one which comes on a bootable DVD and you boot the machine from it, so Windows never gets a chance to run. Amusingly, Kaspersky offer these bootable scanners for free. A more roundabout way to achieve almost the same thing is to use Trueimage (a US product stolen by a Russian, and which works superbly) to create a backup of the hard disk and mount that backup using Trueimage on another (known clean) machine and scan it there with some AV software.
Skype is another horrid piece of junk which slows a PC down.
A fresh format and OS reinstall will fix it for sure but at what cost? And if this is a corporate issue laptop you may reinstall whatever is causing the problem.
Does Task Manager / Processes (shift control escape) show any CPU activity somewhere? If it doesn’t but the PC runs very slow then it must be at a low level, inside a driver or something like that.
Another possibility is a trojan which turned the laptop into a remotely controlled bot. A format and a clean OS install will fix that.
What made you believe it was a graphics card doing this? You can upgrade the drivers on these, usually.
Almost nobody understands Windows so posting on the various IT forums is usually a waste of time.
My experience would suggest uninstall any unnecessary programs.
Also look at the start up programs and get rid of (uninstall or disable) anything that you don’t really need.
If that doesn’t solve the problem, then format the hard drive and install again from backup media. This will certainly speed up the machine.
If a month later, it’s slow again, then get a new machine.
dublinpilot wrote:
My experience would suggest uninstall any unnecessary programs.
Peter wrote:
Go into Control Panel / Programs and Features and uninstall everything not needed.
Already done that. Removed any unneeded item, improved system settings (best performance), startup tasks et cetera. There’s nothing to win.
Peter wrote:
What made you believe it was a graphics card doing this?
It’s that I noted on the performance monitor (it’s in the task manager) showing 3d graphics performance it rises to 100% when, for example, I open up a web page with something embedded, that is, practically any web page despite this forum . And whenever it is at 100% the system freezes or runs slowly. At some point (obviously when the process is done) the system turns back to normal. As this is quite consistent this pointed me towards the graphics. I always install the newest drivers (the Lenovo suite does that automatically).
Have you tried to disable hardware acceleration in browsers?
@UdoR, you can pull the system disk out of the good one, put it into the slow ones and check whether they remain slow. If they do, it’s a hardware problem, otherwise a software one.
