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I've got HP Pavilion dv6-6167cl Entertainment Notebook PC which is very slow under Windows 8.

I previously had Windows 7, and currently I have "clear" Windows 8 with 5 installed apps.

There is 2-5 sec delay whenever these actions are performed:

  1. Select font in Word 2013 with it's preview feature;
  2. Open an Open/Save File/Folder dialog window. For example, when I attach a file for email I wait 3 sec. to see the dialog window or to scroll after the dialog window's opening or to switch among folders;
  3. Click select all files (check boxes) to download in uTorrent;
  4. Open My Computer or disks (C, D...) or folders;
  5. Click Charms->Settings->Power to see an appearing box with options Sleep, Shutdown, Restart.
  6. Close a file (image, doc);
  7. Switch between windows and etc.

CPU's utilization is no more than 5% and it doesn't' happen every time but happens 20% of cases.

I cannot watch movies cause they get stuck every 10-15 sec. It doesn't matter what quality they have (1.4 GB or 8 GB) or what codecs/video drivers are installed (I've tried several). I had the same issue in Windows 7.

Windows 8 rates my laptop at 5.2

How to fix this problem?

Edited:

Following suggestions I installed all HP/Intel drivers and used Windows Performance Recorder and Analyzer working in Word 2013.

Does the below graph show any issues?

enter image description here

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  • Have you installed the drivers for your chipset, graphics, hard drive, etc? They can make a pretty big difference in performance. If not, go here: h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/… Choose your operating system (no Windows 8 here, just choose 32 or 64 bits WIndows 7)
    – Simon Verbeke
    Mar 22, 2013 at 8:28
  • If it's really not clear what the issue is, you could go all out and xperf your laptop for a while.
    – ta.speot.is
    Mar 22, 2013 at 9:04

4 Answers 4

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Judging from your snapshot, it appears that you're running low on memory and Windows 8 is frantically trying to swap to disk. Random access disk caching is extremely slow in all operating systems in general, but Windows 8 is particularly bad with it in my experience.

I've noticed this issue on my brand new Windows 8 laptop and the only solution that I've been able to apply is to disable some of the Windows 8 apps like the built-in mail and messaging, and shut off Google Drive sync and other services that take a lot of memory. If memory stays below a certain threshold, Windows relies less upon Virtual memory and the issue goes away for me.

Others, including some close friends have been running into this issue yet there is not a lot of information online beyond on how to fix it. In fact it seems to be relatively common and the most popular suggestion seems to be to use the Refresh feature. It works for others, but I have just opted to keep below 50% memory usage instead.

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Have you done any tests on your hard drive or memory? I would run a test with Crystal Disk Info on your hard drive (this will run inside of windows) and perhaps memtest86+ on your memory (you will need to download this and burn it to a disk, then boot to it).

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My guess is that you hard disk is not "properly aligned to 4K sectors". You've got a hard drive of 640GB. Recently manufactured hard drive larger than 500GB has 4K physical sector, i.e. Advanced Format. If the hard drive has more than one partition, the partitions must be "4K aligned". Mistakenly aligned partitions will cause severe performance problem, much like what you've got. How is your hard drive partitioined? What's your hard disk brand? Acronis has alignment tools for Western Digital and HGST(Hitachi) respectively to check whether the hard disk is properly aligned or not, and if it's not, these tools can align it for you. For Segate hard disk, try this. Technically speaking, realign unaligned partitions will cause no data loss, all you files will be kept intact. But you'd better make backups for important files in case of something going wrong.

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  • Toshiba HDD, I downloaded PAT from it, and PAT says nothing to align or my HDD or partitions don't' support the alignment.
    – Vasa Blin
    Mar 26, 2013 at 10:52
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In my case Windows 8 was very painfully slow and hard-drive disk usage at 99% - look in Task Manager, process tab ~(disk usage). I found the problem to be Windows Defender, so I have replaced it with a 3rd party antivirus tool. Seemed to be windows defender real-time scanning was causing the slow down and forcing high disk usage. I turned off Windows Defender and installed AVG Free instead. Computer seems much faster, and hard-drive usage has dropped to 1%. Remarkable. The disk isn't continually running any more.

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