How to find out what slows down my PC?

MattTheBat · Aug 27, 2025

I upgraded to Win 11 about a month ago from a max 1 year fresh Win 10 installation. Speed was generally Ok for most of the time.
I applied the updates in the past two weeks and noticed a slow down, also more memory was getting tight. Upgraded from 32GB TEAMGROUP-UD4-3200 to 64 GB Crucial Pro 64GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM. Mobo is a Gigabyte B450M DS3H V2, latest BIOS.
Right now sometimes programs are not responding, the memory reached around 50-53% (note: doesn't get higher than that). It takes about 20 sec to populate event viewer.
This is usually a fast machine with a Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core and a WD_BLACK 1TB SN850X NVMe.
Only few 10016 errors in the event viewers show. The SSDs are 50-70% filled and perform well without errors.
I ran sfc/ scannow and had some few repairs, but no improvement.

How do I find out what the bottleneck is?

Thanks!

MattTheBat · Aug 27, 2025

Added two screen shots...

antspants · Aug 27, 2025

MattTheBat said:
Speed was generally Ok for most of the time.

Windows 10 isn’t as resource intensive as Windows 11. That’s not considering how much of a drag 24H2 is on older machines.
There are members that will say “My computer is 150 years old and it runs just fine” but my reality is that the difference between running Windows 10 to Windows 11, is more than noticeable. In fact there is no comparison.

antspants · Aug 27, 2025

I’m on Windows 11 23H2. I did 24H2 and one of my older computers fell into a heap. I back-stepped and loaded a 23H2 image and it was adiquate again.

Edit:

Also, a clean install of 24H2 (or 23H2) will perform better than an “upgrade” from 10.

Marcus Vinicus · Aug 27, 2025

Hi @MattTheBat

What happens when you boot into Safe Mode. Does it boot and run faster?

MattTheBat · Aug 27, 2025

Speed was generally Ok for most of the time after the upgrade.

Marcus Vinicus · Aug 27, 2025

When the PC is bogging down the Task Manager should show what is hogging system resources.

glasskuter · Aug 27, 2025

Perform a clean boot to eliminate software conflict causing the issue. If it doesn't happen in a clean boot, you have some software conflicting with Windows. Brink's procedure will help you weed out which one. See what you usage and speed are like in clean boot.Perform a Clean Boot in Windows 11 to Troubleshoot Software Conflicts Tutorial

Make sure you have no corrupt system files that is causing this problem. Open a command prompt as administrator and type dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
When complete restart. Then open command prompt as admin again and run sfc /scannow
Pay attention to the scan results to see if SFC found anything it could not repair

Use safe boot to eliminate a driver causing issues.
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/boot-to-safe-mode-in-windows-11.538/

MattTheBat · Aug 27, 2025

Marcus Vinicus said:
When the PC is bogging down the Task Manager should show what is hogging system resources.

That's my point. With little network traffic, 6% CPU, 53% Memory and 0% Disk activity - what's hogging?

And why does my Memory not go higher than about 53%?

Ghot · Aug 27, 2025

MattTheBat said:
And why does my Memory not go higher than about 53%?

With 64GB of RAM, I'm surprised it even gets to 53%.
I only get 40% usage and I have only 16 GB of RAM.

On a side note, here's 10 points just for filling out your computer specs.

Here's some other things that you may find useful...

Quickie Eleven Forum Setup Guide for new Members

Quickie Interface tour... Quickie set up... At the top right, click on your name, then choose "Preferences". Then go through everything on the left side. Quickie navigation... Click Forums and choose a subforum, OR... Click Forums, then New Posts or What's New Ranks, Trophies...

www.elevenforum.com

Macrium Reflect, AOMEI Backupper and Hasleo Backup Suite - GUIDES

How to use backup software... 1. When everything is working perfectly... make a full Windows backup. 2. Then, if something breaks... restore from the latest backup. 3. Then... try "whatever you were doing" a different way. If it still breaks Windows, then... go to step #2. 4. Repeat...

www.elevenforum.com

Windows 11 Tweaks - Leader Board.

These are tweaks I've seen asked for... many times. They are collected here for easy access. All of these and more can be found in the Eleven Forum Tutorials Make sure to read the "notes" in the various tutorials. At the bottom of the first post in all the "tutorials", there are links to...

www.elevenforum.com

Marcus Vinicus · Aug 27, 2025

Ghot said:
With 64GB of RAM, I'm surprised it even gets to 53%.
I only get 40% usage and I have only 16 GB of RAM.

Good point, the Task Manager should show under the Processes tab what is sucking up the ram.

Eksy61 · Aug 28, 2025

A more powerful tool than the Task Manager is the Resource Monitor, which is also built into Windows. For example, the Resource Monitor can show you the rate of page faults per second for a process. Constant paging can make response feel slower,

The Resource Monitor can show you the average disk queue length. A long queue means that processes are waiting a longer time to access a storage drive, which means the drive cannot keep up with peak demands on it.

spapakons · Aug 28, 2025

I have read in other threads that some recent cumulative updates might cause slow down. Uninstall the updates up to a month ago and see if the issue fixes. Then slowly install a few updates at a time. If it sounds complicated, maybe it is easier to reinstall Windows 11 and slowly install the updates a few at a time.

JLArranz · Aug 28, 2025

Although I don't think it's the cause, with 64 GB I'd disable the pagefile. My Windows 11 has now 14.7 GB commited and 8 GB RAM with pagefile enabled for this RAM size of course. I also see the percentage of use, 79%, but Idk if it's too relevant, the really important number is the committed memory vs OS and activity, for example I have a Windows 7 16GB pagefile disabled and a Windows 10 32 GB pagefile disabled, but I wouldn't have disabled the 10's pagefile with 16 GB RAM (it does 11-12 commited, half an unexpected and poof!) . This 11 system is slow by nature (Celeron J4125) but I haven't noticed differences with the latter updates (it's agile for light things 90% of the time).

If the MattTheBat system has like 34 GB commited maybe there's some problem? My Windows 10 has had 16 and 32 GB and the committed memory is about the same.

spapakons · Aug 28, 2025

With today's fast SSDs the delay due to paging is negligible. Since it is a fresh installation it's faster to reinstall Windows 11 and then install carefully one cumulative update at a time to find the culprit. Also Windows Update might have replaced the graphics drivers causing drop in performance. Make sure you manually download latest driver directly from manufacturer. If there is a chipset driver, install this first.

MattTheBat · Aug 28, 2025

spapakons said:
With today's fast SSDs the delay due to paging is negligible. Since it is a fresh installation it's faster to reinstall Windows 11 and then install carefully one cumulative update at a time to find the culprit. Also Windows Update might have replaced the graphics drivers causing drop in performance. Make sure you manually download latest driver directly from manufacturer. If there is a chipset driver, install this first.

Re "reinstall Windows 11" - I guess you are referring to repair install? Drivers are from manufacturers.

MattTheBat · Aug 28, 2025

glasskuter said:
Perform a clean boot to eliminate software conflict causing the issue. If it doesn't happen in a clean boot, you have some software conflicting with Windows. Brink's procedure will help you weed out which one. See what you usage and speed are like in clean boot.Perform a Clean Boot in Windows 11 to Troubleshoot Software Conflicts Tutorial

Make sure you have no corrupt system files that is causing this problem. Open a command prompt as administrator and type dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
When complete restart. Then open command prompt as admin again and run sfc /scannow
Pay attention to the scan results to see if SFC found anything it could not repair

Use safe boot to eliminate a driver causing issues.
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/boot-to-safe-mode-in-windows-11.538/

Thanks for this, will do step by step. dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth and sfc /scannow alrady done. Had sfc /scannow done a day ago, don't recall the location of the log file though. Now no errors.

spapakons · Aug 28, 2025

MattTheBat said:
Re "reinstall Windows 11" - I guess you are referring to repair install? Drivers are from manufacturers.

No repair, clean installation (format disk and install again).

Marcus Vinicus · Aug 28, 2025

The other very useful tool for diagnosing what is using memory is RamMap. Gives multiple views including processes and a file summary of which files are sucking up memory.

RAMMap - Sysinternals

An advanced physical memory analysis utility that presents usage information in several ways on its different tabs.

learn.microsoft.com

BamaInArk · Aug 28, 2025

When was the last time you updated the AMD Chipset drivers?

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