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I notice slow response of my PC in the afternoon or evening, when it has been heavily loaded during the day. In my case, the heavy loading does not mean particularly high CPU usage, but using a dozen programs simultaneously, and switching between program windows hundreds of times very quickly for hours on three 4K monitors.

The slowness expresses itself in that in the end I can literally observe the creation of program windows when opening programs. For example, when just opening Windows Explorer, I can see the GUI elements being drawn one by one, which takes about 1 second altogether.

I've already tried Rizonesoft Memory Booster, a tool that forces some kind of clearing of the RAM, but that doesn't feel like it makes any difference. I have also tried and turned off the pagefile without any difference.

My PC runs Windows 10 and has 32 GB RAM, an i7-3770K Intel CPU, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 graphics card and five contemporary SATA SSDs.

I take care not to run any unnecessary background processes, and I can't seem to see anything unusual via Process Explorer either.

I have CoreTemp running in the Systray and am usually at around 50-60°C. The graphics card fans are nearly always stopped.

Is there any way to refresh the PC without doing a time-consuming reboot?

Here is a screenshot of Process Explorer, sorted by "Working Set". Does this show anything special?

screenshot of Process Monitor

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  • Switching between applications "hundreds of times very quickly for hours on three 4K monitors." does not slow a computer. There are only three things that slow a computer down. 1. Such a high memory usage there isn't even virtual memory to spare 2. High CPU usage (99%+) 3. Slow storage drives caused and/or high I/O error rates. If File Explorer is "drawing slowly" then you have extremely high CPU usage and/or extremely high memory usage. Turning off your pagefile is the last thing you want to try, often, that will lead to worst performance. The application you tried is snake oil by the way
    – Ramhound
    Jul 8, 2021 at 20:10
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    (Note: Memory booster products are junk.) You might have a memory leak - does closing all your processes help? If not, open Resource Monitor, Memory section, and click "Working Set" to sort descending and see if there is a memory eater in there.
    – harrymc
    Jul 8, 2021 at 20:12
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    What does Task Manager show in the performance tab? What resources are in short supply? CPU? Disk? something else? Also, check that you are not opening additional instances of applications, rather than switching between existing instances. Jul 8, 2021 at 20:20
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    It seems Explorer and DWM are using a bit too much memory. Try terminating and restarting both. Ultrasearch is using the most memory however I don't know what it's usual memory use is. Explorer runs code from lots of other programs. EG Context menu handlers, file preview handlers etc. Often one of these has gone wild. Jul 8, 2021 at 21:35
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    Some programs collect RAM and don't release it well I think. So closing those programs might help even if you open them again. Try closing Chrome and then opening it to the same pages and check task manger to see if that helped.
    – User42
    Jul 9, 2021 at 15:40

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You seem to be running a lot of Chrome tabs/extensions as well as Pale Moon at the same time. Could you perhaps use only one browser and stop unnecessary extensions and tabs? Chrome has annoying default behaviour of running some processes in the background even when you are not using it but this can be turned off in settings. It's been highlighted by others but something is going on with Ultra Search, do you need this running just now? If you are using up most of your computer's memory perhaps you have a hard drive or virtual memory problem. Also sometimes when computer is going very slow there is a driver problem, perhaps you could check this out. I would also second what others have said, be wary of software that claims to enhance performance. I have known some to be Trojans. If you could easily enhance performance then the OS would probably be doing it already.

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