Sluggish operations, in comparison.

James · Jan 11, 2023

Hi there. Sorry - I couldn't think of a good title. Anyway my computer (specs are in my profile) has been - for quite a few months now - running sluggishly in some aspects. I am on Windows 11 21H2. I updated to 22H2, loved it, however when i went into file explorer, then to my hard drive (not os drive) it froze, and not responding.

For example.. opening settings, I am on this screen for atleast 5 seconds!

And also, if I right click in file explorer it can take upwards of 5 seconds!

My computer specs certainly dont suggest such performance. Please let me know what I can do (and yes, I have followed all youtube tutorials and whatnot)

I would consider going back to W10, but it has been far from 10 days (about 7 months) and I have removed windows.old. Also - I couldn't freshly install Windows 10 (or do it, keeping files) since I have a couple of games easily taking 150GB each which I would have to reinstall

So in this post I'm either looking for a way to
a) reset to windows 10, keeping files and apps*
b) speed up windows 11 (and I have tried an in-place upgrade refresh)

c*) (sort of) * My very big games are on the D:/ drive however, they would get removed upon installing fresh windows on C:/ wouldn't they? Unless there is a way to get them back just having the files on d?

SlicEnDicE · Jan 11, 2023

It is possible that some power saving features are enabled for the Seagate drive. If the drive is in sleep mode, then it takes quite a while to start it again, since we are talking about a "spinner"-HDD. Another cause could be that your HDD is corrupt somehow or even starting to fail.

What comes to games, if you have installed your games using Steam, then you can reassign the Steam library folder back to your D-drive after a fresh install of Windows. Steam will re-verify the files, and only update what is missing or are wrong version. You can even install Steam games on an external device and it will work on any computer as long as you reconfigure Steam to explicitly use the Steam Games folder on your external drive.

Hope this helps.

James · Jan 11, 2023

SlicEnDicE said:
It is possible that some power saving features are enabled for the Seagate drive. If the drive is in sleep mode, then it takes quite a while to start it again, since we are talking about a "spinner"-HDD. Another cause could be that your HDD is corrupt somehow or even starting to fail.

What comes to games, if you have installed your games using Steam, then you can reassign the Steam library folder back to your D-drive after a fresh install of Windows. Steam will re-verify the files, and only update what is missing or are wrong version. You can even install Steam games on an external device and it will work on any computer as long as you reconfigure Steam to explicitly use the Steam Games folder on your external drive.

Hope this helps.

Thank you for a very detailed answer!

11 of my games are on steam, on the D drive however my two games taking 150 odd gb (Ms Flight Sim and Forza Horizon 5) Are downloaded through the MS store. In terms of Sleep mode on HDD can you tell me how to turn it off?I hope the HDD isn't failing!! The computer is 2 years old. I have got a fair amount of dust in the computer, could this be the culprit? If you can give me a way to salvage the D:/ games from the MS store perhaps i will up/down grade to windows 10

thank you very much