I have a 3yo Surface Pro 5 that is now running so slowly that it is almost unusable.
The batteries have died, but I can live with that and plug it in, but in spite of some extensive searches I have been unable to detect the cause of the go-slow.
Task manager gives no clue and Malwarebytes, Ccleaner and other virus scans failed to find the problem.
Before I start a complete reset (in the hope of a cure) does anyone have a suggestion that I could try please.
Is it running Windows 10 or something older?
I’m going to assume Windows 10
Go into Task Manager again.
Check the Startup tab
Disable for now everything listed here. (right click & choose disable)
Go to Details tab; Click CPU header so biggest CPU using program is on top. watch this for a little bit and see if some program is using up the CPU cycles.
Still in details click Memory header to sort use, see if a memory hog is the problem. Firefox use to go nuts sometimes.
Go To the Performance Tab; Check CPU, Memory & Disk usage. Are any of these up high?
Press Windows Key & E at the same time, (opens file Explorer),
Right click your c: drive; pick properties and see how much Free Space you have left. If this is below 4 GB you found your issue and need to free up some storage.
Do you have more than one anti-virus on the machine? If so uninstall one immediately. Or better yet, for now uninstall both and make sure Windows Security is up an running.
Thanks for that.
I have now cleaned the machine and installed a fresh copy of W10. It took most of a day and has had no visible effect on the speed, so it must (I think) be hardware and not software unless it is part of the underlying system.
Since the problem was coincidental with the failure of the batteries and it now only works when plugged in, I think that the only cure might be replacement batteries. This is something far beyond my level of expertise so I guess that I have to write off what was an £800 investment three years ago.
What do you mean specifically by “the battery has died”? It does not power the device for any significant length of time, it is not charging, or it is not recognized at all? Almost all laptops are designed to clock down when the battery is removed or inoperable because the battery is used to buffer the power supply for instantaneous power demands.
I didn’t know that and I’ve been working with computers since the 80s. That is good to know.
The computer does not recognise that it has a battery at all.
I wasn’t aware that this would make the laptop slow down as may be obvious from my posts
Open the Task Manager and switch to the Performance tab. Then watch the current clock speed in the top left and do something somewhat processor intensive like play a video or open and close apps. Compare it to the nominal processor speed, which should also be listed to the right with the processor model.
It’s not every laptop, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Last year I bought my mother a Dell All-in-one computer to replace an old, very slow desktop, and found to my dismay that the new one was hardly any faster. I won’t bore you with the details of how we figured it out, but it had come with Bitlocker disk encryption on by default, and once that was turned off it performed just fine.
Since you’ve reinstalled Windows yourself, thus is not likely to be the issue, but I mention it just in case it’s helpful somehow.
As you say, it ‘should’ be clean.
Anyone got a suggestion about what to do with the now redundant tablet. I have bought a new one but it seems wrong somehow to just bin it.
I have no suggestions for the old machine.
FWIW, I will mention my recent experience with my Surface. I use it only while traveling and I haven’t gone anywhere in a year (since Thanksgiving, 2019 in fact). But I took it out and tried to run it last week. The battery indicator said it was down to 1%. And it wouldn’t run anything until I plugged it in and the battery got up to 5%. Then it worked fine and I charged it fully. But this suggests that it may well use the battery for power supply filtering as suggested above.
Around 1956 I saw a Univac I in operation and the power supply filter was a 1 farad capacitor (consisting of a room with 2000 electrolytics, 500 mf each). I still wonder whether they could have used a large battery instead.
“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.”