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Sometimes I notice that system is very slow and when I see task manager, these are information in performance tab:

Utilization: 8%
Speed: 0.2 Ghz
Maxsimum speed: 2.5 GHz

Hardware details are:

Windows 8 Pro x64
Sony vaio vpcse23fx
core i5 2450M
RAM 8 GB
VGA Intel gen2 hd 3000
ATI 7400 series
HDD 5400 rpm

As an aside, my graphics driver is from leshcatlabs.net (updated and joined drivers for Intel and ATI).
I use this driver because last update of Sony's driver is 2012 and original ATI's driver from AMD has some problems.
I also disabled ATI card in device manager but problem occurred again. Is it possible that this problem be related to VGA?

Please note, this slow issue occurs at least once every 2 hours, but only lasts a period of time.

What do I mean by slow? It is slow when I want to open an app, when I move mouse (moves with some lags), when I open task manager, when I switch tabs in chrome, even slow in network. Also copying and moving files.

It's obviously related to frequency, because when frequency backs to 2 GHz everything acts normally again.

How can I fix this annoying speed issue?

Update: I found that this issue occures only when laptop uses Intel VGA, And instantly after switching to ATI card frequency goes back to 2GHz.

Distance between frequency issue occurences in my tests is under 1 minute! I mean after switching graphics card to Intel, It happens after less than a minute and switching to ATI fixes it instantly.


Solved: By using amd.com driver and drivermax for updating intel driver problem totally solved and after some months of this update i have not this problem again.

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  • Speed of cpu. frequency of cpu is 0.2 ~ 0.4 GHz. This isn't normal speed when everything in laptop is slow.
    – Morteza
    Aug 6, 2014 at 9:42
  • Sorry, I mean, because you mention the graphics card, does the slow issue happen only with video/animations? Is it quick booting up but slow using certain applications? Is it slow from booting up and using it (if so, why mentino the graphic card)
    – Dave
    Aug 6, 2014 at 9:43
  • It's just a guess, i'm not professional in hardware. I just said maybe it's related to vga because it's not original sony driver.
    – Morteza
    Aug 6, 2014 at 9:44
  • I see. Can you explain what is slow: does the slow issue happen only with video/animations? Is it quick booting up but slow using certain applications? Is it slow from booting up?
    – Dave
    Aug 6, 2014 at 9:46
  • Slow In what It is processing, copying, running apps etc..
    – smali
    Aug 6, 2014 at 9:46

1 Answer 1

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Slowness on a machine can be caused not just by CPU activity but also by disk activity and I have seen this on a number of occassions. Sometimes this could be down to a background process accessing a big file.

To check your disk activity download Sysinternal's Process Monitor. When your computer is running slow then run the utility for I would say no more than a minute (more than that is not really necessary).

When you've completed your trace, do a count for the number of times each file was being accessed during that the trace you captured. To do this, go to to Tools -> Count Values Occurences -> Select Path from the Column drop-down and then click on the Count button. Click the Count button to sort the count numbers in ascending/descending order and it should become clear which files are being heavily accessed. Double-click on any of those file paths to focus on them and see which programs are responsible for the disk access.

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  • I tried this and answer is Explorer.exe that's triying to read from registry. "Process name: Explorer.exe, PID:3936, Operation:RegQueryKey, Path:HKCU\Software\Classes, Result:Success, Detail:Query Handle Tags". Is this results normal? @user319647
    – Morteza
    Aug 8, 2014 at 7:12
  • In another test (this time in normal situation of cpu) result was completely different. This time many applications was on result (counted and filtered) but in previous test (in low frequency) 99% of processes in result was Explorer.exe.
    – Morteza
    Aug 8, 2014 at 7:18
  • HKCU\Software\Classes by itself isn't an issue: I think Explorer is drilling through the registry hierarchy which is why you see it there. When your machine slows again can you run the trace for a minute. Do a count using my instructions and note the top 10 file paths being accessed. List those 10 paths here with the number of times being accessed and I'll have a look. As a side note, how much CPU is Explorer.exe taking up during slowness?
    – user319647
    Aug 8, 2014 at 9:53
  • See this image for the list: imgur.com/b8Se9sN
    – Morteza
    Aug 11, 2014 at 17:19
  • Explorer.exe cpu usage is less than 1%
    – Morteza
    Aug 11, 2014 at 17:20

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