Computer as slow as glue.

Ever since my I updated my old Windows 7 powered Dell to Windows 10 it
has been as slow as glue. It is mainly used by my wife who avoids
using it because it is so slow. Arising from this is the problem thhat
frequentl it so long since it was used that as soon as it is booted
Acronis starts up and backs it up to an external drive.

Anyay, I have been fighting this for months and trying all kinds of
things to get it running faster but with no success. I have even
disabled the backups but that hasn't made a difference.

The other day I read about fast boot sometimes causing speed problems
so I disabled it. Now booting the machine is a rather ramshackle
affair with screens coming and going but once the computer is up and
starte it has all its old speed back.

I thought I would just mention it.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

Eric Stevens wrote:
Ever since my I updated my old Windows 7 powered Dell to Windows 10 it
has been as slow as glue. It is mainly used by my wife who avoids
using it because it is so slow. Arising from this is the problem thhat
frequentl it so long since it was used that as soon as it is booted
Acronis starts up and backs it up to an external drive.

Anyay, I have been fighting this for months and trying all kinds of
things to get it running faster but with no success. I have even
disabled the backups but that hasn't made a difference.

The other day I read about fast boot sometimes causing speed problems
so I disabled it. Now booting the machine is a rather ramshackle
affair with screens coming and going but once the computer is up and
starte it has all its old speed back.

I thought I would just mention it.

Do you have a model number for this beast of a device ?

A good config for Windows 10 is quad core (4C 4T or 4C 8T perhaps).
Two cores is about as low as I'd want to go (because of
Windows Defender grazing habits). Either a 2C 2T or a 2C 4T.
I have a single core AMD processor (1C 1T) running Windows 10
on the laptop, and that's pretty slow.

I have troubles like this in virtual machines (particularly,
on my more gutless computer), and watching it, I can't
help but feel it's mostly a VirtualBox "emulation" issue.

Depending on the user and the situation, in Win10 Pro you can
use GPEDIT to disable Windows Defender (i.e. not just the
control in the GUI panel, but stop it just as if a third-party
AV had replaced Windows Defender). I found this made the
machine "ready to use" once it had booted. Before
I did that, the virtual machine was only "ready to use"
after Windows Defender got bored of scanning it for a couple hours.

Fast boot should not cause a speed problem, because it's
a hibernated kernel, the kernel is reloaded into memory,
all the drivers are "warm started". Unless the kernel image is
flat-out corrupted (and it's likely to have a checksum
of some sort for protection), the kernel should really
perform like it did during the previous session. Whereas,
if you are hibernating the entire session (S4 Hibernate,
not just Fast Boot), there could be applications which
are railed on recovery. You would at least want to
examine Task Manager, to see if the problem is right
there in front of you.

Paul

On Sun, 09 Jun 2019 03:31:08 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
Ever since my I updated my old Windows 7 powered Dell to Windows 10 it
has been as slow as glue. It is mainly used by my wife who avoids
using it because it is so slow. Arising from this is the problem thhat
frequentl it so long since it was used that as soon as it is booted
Acronis starts up and backs it up to an external drive.

Anyay, I have been fighting this for months and trying all kinds of
things to get it running faster but with no success. I have even
disabled the backups but that hasn't made a difference.

The other day I read about fast boot sometimes causing speed problems
so I disabled it. Now booting the machine is a rather ramshackle
affair with screens coming and going but once the computer is up and
starte it has all its old speed back.

I thought I would just mention it.

Do you have a model number for this beast of a device ?

A good config for Windows 10 is quad core (4C 4T or 4C 8T perhaps).
Two cores is about as low as I'd want to go (because of
Windows Defender grazing habits). Either a 2C 2T or a 2C 4T.
I have a single core AMD processor (1C 1T) running Windows 10
on the laptop, and that's pretty slow.

I have troubles like this in virtual machines (particularly,
on my more gutless computer), and watching it, I can't
help but feel it's mostly a VirtualBox "emulation" issue.

Depending on the user and the situation, in Win10 Pro you can
use GPEDIT to disable Windows Defender (i.e. not just the
control in the GUI panel, but stop it just as if a third-party
AV had replaced Windows Defender). I found this made the
machine "ready to use" once it had booted. Before
I did that, the virtual machine was only "ready to use"
after Windows Defender got bored of scanning it for a couple hours.

Fast boot should not cause a speed problem, because it's
a hibernated kernel, the kernel is reloaded into memory,
all the drivers are "warm started". Unless the kernel image is
flat-out corrupted (and it's likely to have a checksum
of some sort for protection), the kernel should really
perform like it did during the previous session. Whereas,
if you are hibernating the entire session (S4 Hibernate,
not just Fast Boot), there could be applications which
are railed on recovery. You would at least want to
examine Task Manager, to see if the problem is right
there in front of you.

At one stage I almost knew task manager by heart. :-(

I will get back to you with the rest later.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On Sun, 09 Jun 2019 03:31:08 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
Ever since my I updated my old Windows 7 powered Dell to Windows 10 it
has been as slow as glue. It is mainly used by my wife who avoids
using it because it is so slow. Arising from this is the problem thhat
frequentl it so long since it was used that as soon as it is booted
Acronis starts up and backs it up to an external drive.

Anyay, I have been fighting this for months and trying all kinds of
things to get it running faster but with no success. I have even
disabled the backups but that hasn't made a difference.

The other day I read about fast boot sometimes causing speed problems
so I disabled it. Now booting the machine is a rather ramshackle
affair with screens coming and going but once the computer is up and
starte it has all its old speed back.

I thought I would just mention it.

Do you have a model number for this beast of a device ?

The machine is a Dell XPS 8300 delivered new to me on 28 January 2010.
Intel i7-2600 3.4 GHz,
8GB RAM,
64 bit,
1803 build 17134.65.

A good config for Windows 10 is quad core (4C 4T or 4C 8T perhaps).
Two cores is about as low as I'd want to go (because of
Windows Defender grazing habits). Either a 2C 2T or a 2C 4T.
I have a single core AMD processor (1C 1T) running Windows 10
on the laptop, and that's pretty slow.

I have troubles like this in virtual machines (particularly,
on my more gutless computer), and watching it, I can't
help but feel it's mostly a VirtualBox "emulation" issue.

Depending on the user and the situation, in Win10 Pro you can
use GPEDIT to disable Windows Defender (i.e. not just the
control in the GUI panel, but stop it just as if a third-party
AV had replaced Windows Defender). I found this made the
machine "ready to use" once it had booted. Before
I did that, the virtual machine was only "ready to use"
after Windows Defender got bored of scanning it for a couple hours.

Fast boot should not cause a speed problem, because it's
a hibernated kernel, the kernel is reloaded into memory,
all the drivers are "warm started". Unless the kernel image is
flat-out corrupted (and it's likely to have a checksum
of some sort for protection), the kernel should really
perform like it did during the previous session. Whereas,
if you are hibernating the entire session (S4 Hibernate,
not just Fast Boot), there could be applications which
are railed on recovery. You would at least want to
examine Task Manager, to see if the problem is right
there in front of you.

Paul
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sun, 09 Jun 2019 03:31:08 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
Ever since my I updated my old Windows 7 powered Dell to Windows 10 it
has been as slow as glue. It is mainly used by my wife who avoids
using it because it is so slow. Arising from this is the problem thhat
frequentl it so long since it was used that as soon as it is booted
Acronis starts up and backs it up to an external drive.

Anyay, I have been fighting this for months and trying all kinds of
things to get it running faster but with no success. I have even
disabled the backups but that hasn't made a difference.

The other day I read about fast boot sometimes causing speed problems
so I disabled it. Now booting the machine is a rather ramshackle
affair with screens coming and going but once the computer is up and
starte it has all its old speed back.

I thought I would just mention it.
Do you have a model number for this beast of a device ?

The machine is a Dell XPS 8300 delivered new to me on 28 January 2010.
Intel i7-2600 3.4 GHz,
8GB RAM,
64 bit,
1803 build 17134.65.

There's no excuse for that to be slow. That's got plenty of horsepower.

But to cover the possibilities, go into the BIOS
and disable HyperThreading.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-3-80-ghz.html

# of Cores 4
# of Threads 8 === disable Hyperthreading, this becomes 4
# Processor Base Frequency 3.40 GHz

One other thing I've seen, is when the Performance setting is
"Balanced", sometimes the clock doesn't spool up properly under
demand. You can set Performance to "High Performance" to jam
the clock rate to 3.4GHz even when idle. This could use another
20 watts of electricity when the machine is idle. But, it's
another experiment you could try.

The reason for disabling Hyperthreading, is to prevent "cache thrashing".
And the IXBT site had an article which described the "Replay Loop" that
Pentium 4 processors used. There was a bug in that, whereby a thread
could stall for around a millisecond. Most people would not notice these
if they occurred. Disabling Hyperthreading, means mechanisms of
that sort are disabled, so there is then no possibility of
them arising.

When you hibernate a kernel (using Fast Boot) and the machine is using
ASLR (address space layout randomization), the frozen kernel has to go
back to the same addresses as before. I don't think the kernel is "loaded"
in the conventional sense (because, that's what "real booting" would have
done, and Fast Boot saves time by not doing it that way0. This means, the
kernel is still first to the trough, and there should be no problem
securing the address map needed by the restored kernel. But that's about
the only complication I can think of, where somehow, a restored kernel
could influence how a system works. It would be something like side-effects
on ASLR.

I've run a boot logging tool, and watched as my computer
does "absolutely nothing" for 20 seconds during the boot
process. The machine has 64GB of RAM, and the time period is
sufficient time to be initializing that memory. (Even though
the BIOS already initialized it to all-zeros, and in less
time than it would take the OS to do it.) But 20 seconds isn't
a lot, compared to other mechanisms for slowing boot (such
as permanent network mounts that the OS keeps searching for).
The mapped network mount problem can prevent boot from
finishing for five minutes. (Mark Russinovich had a straw man
problem in a web article, and showed how to track one of those
down. Mark probably knew as soon as it happened, what that was,
and didn't actually need diagnostic tools.)

Paul

On Sun, 09 Jun 2019 23:08:06 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sun, 09 Jun 2019 03:31:08 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
Ever since my I updated my old Windows 7 powered Dell to Windows 10 it
has been as slow as glue. It is mainly used by my wife who avoids
using it because it is so slow. Arising from this is the problem thhat
frequentl it so long since it was used that as soon as it is booted
Acronis starts up and backs it up to an external drive.

Anyay, I have been fighting this for months and trying all kinds of
things to get it running faster but with no success. I have even
disabled the backups but that hasn't made a difference.

The other day I read about fast boot sometimes causing speed problems
so I disabled it. Now booting the machine is a rather ramshackle
affair with screens coming and going but once the computer is up and
starte it has all its old speed back.

I thought I would just mention it.
Do you have a model number for this beast of a device ?

The machine is a Dell XPS 8300 delivered new to me on 28 January 2010.
Intel i7-2600 3.4 GHz,
8GB RAM,
64 bit,
1803 build 17134.65.

There's no excuse for that to be slow. That's got plenty of horsepower.

But to cover the possibilities, go into the BIOS
and disable HyperThreading.

I will try that but it seems to be OK now that I have disabled Fast
Boot.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-3-80-ghz.html

# of Cores 4
# of Threads 8 === disable Hyperthreading, this becomes 4
# Processor Base Frequency 3.40 GHz

One other thing I've seen, is when the Performance setting is
"Balanced", sometimes the clock doesn't spool up properly under
demand. You can set Performance to "High Performance" to jam
the clock rate to 3.4GHz even when idle. This could use another
20 watts of electricity when the machine is idle. But, it's
another experiment you could try.

The reason for disabling Hyperthreading, is to prevent "cache thrashing".
And the IXBT site had an article which described the "Replay Loop" that
Pentium 4 processors used. There was a bug in that, whereby a thread
could stall for around a millisecond. Most people would not notice these
if they occurred. Disabling Hyperthreading, means mechanisms of
that sort are disabled, so there is then no possibility of
them arising.

When you hibernate a kernel (using Fast Boot) and the machine is using
ASLR (address space layout randomization), the frozen kernel has to go
back to the same addresses as before. I don't think the kernel is "loaded"
in the conventional sense (because, that's what "real booting" would have
done, and Fast Boot saves time by not doing it that way0. This means, the
kernel is still first to the trough, and there should be no problem
securing the address map needed by the restored kernel. But that's about
the only complication I can think of, where somehow, a restored kernel
could influence how a system works. It would be something like side-effects
on ASLR.

I've run a boot logging tool, and watched as my computer
does "absolutely nothing" for 20 seconds during the boot
process. The machine has 64GB of RAM, and the time period is
sufficient time to be initializing that memory. (Even though
the BIOS already initialized it to all-zeros, and in less
time than it would take the OS to do it.) But 20 seconds isn't
a lot, compared to other mechanisms for slowing boot (such
as permanent network mounts that the OS keeps searching for).
The mapped network mount problem can prevent boot from
finishing for five minutes. (Mark Russinovich had a straw man
problem in a web article, and showed how to track one of those
down. Mark probably knew as soon as it happened, what that was,
and didn't actually need diagnostic tools.)

Paul
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens