I have a notebook PC at work and here are times during the day it slows to a crawl when web surfing. This is seen in both Chrome and IE 9. The unit is an HP DV-7 2170USwith 4 gigs of RAM running Win 7 Premium so it should have more than enough horsepower for smooth surfing.
We are a real estate office. We each have our own, individually purchased PCs connected to a central server provided by the broker. Popping up the task manager does not seem to indicate any application that is out of control re using memory resources. The Internet is fed via an Ethernet cable that comes from the wiring closet that houses the router, server, firewall etc. The ISP is Comcast Cable. There is some kind of security+monitoring applet installed on my system that sits in the background that was provided by our server vendor and can monitor the system performance remotely. There are about 20 PCs attached to the server being fed internet.
There are times the system just seems to almost grind to a halt. In fact our office manager got a message forwarded from the vendors aforesaid monitoring program my CPU was showing 90% activity for an extended period of time.
Is there some magic resources monitoring program that will tell me why the system bogs down during the day. The problem seems much more acute during the day than the evening, but have had it bog down at night sometimes during the weekday. Weekends are pretty much bog free.
So far my guesses are -
Inadequate PC horsepower
Security monitoring applet grabbing system resources
Server backing itself up to remote off site location gobbling bandwidth
Comcast bandwidth outside the office being hit hard during the day
Something going on in my system I don’t know about
Perhaps the CPU heat sink has an erratic connection to the CPU.
When the room is warm or you tax the computer a little, it heats up. The computer then throttles back performance to manage the rising heat, and you notice it.
Normally the fan and heat sink are matched to the needs and range of a CPU, but if their proper operation is disrupted, such as a loose connection or obstruction, secondary processes like throttling prevent run away heat and potential damage.
Suggested solution: have the fan inspected, the heat sink reseated and the thermal paste replaced. This wont be a tricky task for a technician.
Its been my experience that all internet security suites always degrade performance significantly. It’s just the way they work. In order to *‘protect’ *you 100% they have to monitor & check literally everything your computer does cycle by cycle. If it’s a work laptop there’s not gonna be much you can do because they’re not gonna let you uninstall it.
If it is CPU temp you are worried about then try speccy, it is a low overhead app that reads and graphs the BIOS temp sensors for all components. It also tells you all kinds of things about CPU usage and memory usage.
I would start out with SPYBOT, another freeware app that will blow away spyware bloated net surfing.
Everyday, I do the following (in this order)
Use disk cleanup in windows to blow away files
Clear cache in IE and Chrome
Clear temporary internet files with your anti virus software
Run spybot
If you see “waiting for cache” at the bottom of the Chrome page when waiting for a website, it is time to blow away the cache. [ctrl+shift+del, click <clear browsing data>]
I would be tempted to download Microsoft’s Process Explorer, which is wonderful; it gives you a detailed list of all the processes running on your machine, which can be sorted by CPU utilisation, writes, etc.
Periodically my PC at work grinds to a halt as well, on account of Sophos Endpoint scanning the machine aggressively on a schedule which I have no control over. Bearing in mind that the machine is an aged Pentium IV with 512mb memory. It’s a known issue, but because I work for a large bureaucracy the problem is basically insoluble. But there might be hope for you; avenge me, and my kind.