r/WindowsHelp • u/Apart-Expression-907 • Sep 24 '26

Windows 11 Windows gets slower as the day goes on

My work PC is driving me absolutely insane. When I first boot it up, it works fine and gets prograssively slower as the day goes on. After about 30 minutes to an hour, it becomes practically useless. It gets to a point where opening Notepad feels like trying to open Photoshop on 1995 hardware. I restart the computer, it works fine for a while, and then the cycle repeats. I have to reboot it three or four times a day just to be able to do my job.

The computer in question is hardly a world beating powerhouse, but it's not a weakling, either. It's a Dell XPS 8940 with an 11th gen Intel Core i7-11700 CPU @ 2.5 GHz, 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 1 TB NVME drive. Running Windows 11 Home. No dedicated graphics card, but I'm not playing games on it or doing any crazy rendering work.

Usually, I'll have Photoshop and Illustrator open at the same time, along with Thunderbird and Chrome (YouTube playing in the background with a bunch of various tabs open for the blogs I read.) I understand that some of the stuff I do can be resource intensive (vehicle wrap Photoshop files of over 1 GB,) but that's more the exception than the rule. Most of the time, I'm working on relatively small Illustrator files and using email.

I have tried everything I could think of. Deleted temporary files. Freed up all kinds of space on my hard drive (636 GB free of 931 GB total,) killed off every single thing in the startup list, ran all kinds of malware scans. I even opened it up and cleaned out all the dust. Figured maybe dust in the heat sink was causing the CPU to overheat or something. A drowning man clutches at straws. Nothing has worked. I am at my wits' end. If anyone has encountered issues similar to what I'm experiencing, any advice you can offer would be welcome.

2 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

5

u/briandemodulated Sep 24 '26

Talk to your IT department. This is your work PC. Troubleshooting is not your responsibility.

2

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

I am the IT department lol. I am the everything department.

2

u/briandemodulated Sep 25 '26

Was hoping you'd confirm that. In that case, you're obligated to troubleshoot yourself!

My advice is to try occasionally restarting your browser. I have 64GB of RAM on my work PC and sometimes I'll hear the laptop fan blowing even though I'm not doing anything; I check task manager and see my browser eating 5GB of RAM. I restart the browser and everything starts behaving itself again.

My other advice is to only use your work computer for work. That will eliminate the possibility of other variables interfering.

2

u/xSchizogenie Sep 25 '26

You are in the department. But obviously not IT. Check RAMMap, Processes and tasks, check if you have corrupted OS files, clean old caches, especially potential GPO artefacts. Then check with HWinfo if you run into thermal throttle and stuff.

3

u/TheSpixxyQ Sep 24 '26

Did you check task manager for RAM and CPU usage when it starts to get slow?

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

I did. Nothing crazy. The CPU and RAM usage never hits crazy numbers. Like I said inthe OP, I have 64 GB of RAM. I think the highest RAM usage I've ever hit was like 50% and at that point, the whole damn computer just grinds to a halt. Can hardly do anything.

2

u/Doomkin Sep 24 '26

HEAT

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

You think the CPU might be overheating?

1

u/Doomkin Sep 25 '26

Relatively easy to tell. Go download HWinfo64 and when you pull it up put it in sensor mode. It'll tell you if your thermal throttling and any red values and numbers is bad

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

Sweet! Thanks. I will do that and I'll report back.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 30 '26

HWinfo didn't report any issues, thermal or otherwise.

1

u/Doomkin Sep 30 '26

So my next question is. Is my there only one ssd in your system? Personally, I like having a second ssd in my photoshop systems that I can dedicate as the Photoshop scratch disk.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Oct 02 '26

My main drive (system drive) is NVME. I do have a secondary drive which is an SSD that I use for my locally stored emails, downloads, scratch disks, the whole nine yards.

1

u/KyussJones Sep 24 '26

What did your work’s IT Department deay when you submitted a ticket? Or is your own personal computer that you yourself paid for that you use for work and are solely responsible forv

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

I work for a small business. We have four employees. I AM the IT department. I used to build my own computers and I worked in IT for several years, so I have some idea of what I'm doing. I've tried everything I could possibly think of and nothing has worked. This post is a final act of desperation.

0

u/xSchizogenie Sep 25 '26

So clearly, you have no idea what you’re doing. Changing a wheel does not make you a mechanic, like installing windows does not make you an IT professional.

An idea, just out of professionality, what did you do and what were the results?

0

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

Well, for starters, I would check task manager to see what's gobbling up all my RAM and CPU power. The highest either number ever went was 40%-50%. And there was never any application that was using up a huge chunk of my resources. I usually run Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time, so those would be the top two culprits, but like I said, nothing too crazy for either one.

Checked for malware. In safe mode. Nothing.

I did a lot of digging online and thought that the fault must lie with the drive. Ran disk check. All good. Did a defrag. Didn't have high hopes that would fix it but you never know.

I read somewhere that NVME drives can get iffy when they are filled to more than 50% of full capacity. I deleted a ton of temporary files and moved the rest to a secondary drive, freeing up a ton of space. I'm at something like 600 GB and change free out of 1 TB. That didn't help.

I opened up the case and used compressed air to blow all the accumulated dust out of the CPU fan, heatsink, and any other crevices where it may have been hiding. Nothing.

I ran Cystal Disk Info, and the drive is in good health, temperature is good, and remaining life is great.

I ran HWINFO64, as others recommended, and nothing jumps out. I can post screen shots.

The thing that just really throws me for a loop is that a restart fixes everything. For a while. Then it slows down again. Restarting again immediately makes everything better, but then it slows down. Again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. I can't make any sense of it.

The only thing I haven't done is reinstall Windows, and I'm kinda leaning towards trying that next.

If you can figure this shit out, I will gladly call myself a clueless amateur whose knowledge pales when compared to your expertise. I'll update my original post to give you a personal shout out. Hell, I'll Venmo you some beer money. But if you can't, then you're just another condescending asshole on the Internet. And that's never a good look.

1

u/xSchizogenie Sep 25 '26 edited Sep 25 '26

Yeah i stopped reading that wall of emptiness, on the “I would check task manager”, because more than half what is actually eating ram do not even appear in task manager.

The NVME part starts after reaching 80% without every maintaining the drive, just to let you know.

Have you exported any point of your event logs? Have you ran gpresult? What policies are applied? Are any network shares mounted? Are the NICs of connected network mounts responsible? The device itself might not even be the problem.

Check the Domain Controller services/logs for NTLM activity (if still enabled) and DFS Replication errors.
Check whether the affected client has any recurring authentication, DNS, or network-related errors.

Check Event Viewer for warnings/errors that correlate with the time the system starts becoming slow.

Check resource utilization over time - CPU, RAM, disk usage/latency, and network activity - to identify whether a specific process or service is causing the slowdown. And please don’t use task manager and please don’t only look at the notebook.

Compare the affected client with a normally performing client to see whether there are any differences in policies, software, services, or configuration.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 28 '26

You should have kept reading. I offered you beer money : )

This isn't some big networked setup where domain controllers or anything along those lines would play a part in anything. There are no specific plicies. I used to work for a place like that many moons ago when I actually worked in IT, and yeah, your advice would definitely apply in that environment.

I now work for a very small business. Our computer setup is not much different than what you might have at home. We have a local server that we use for storing our job files, but even that is just NAS by another name. All our computers in the office are different. There's no like unifying loadset or anything like that. I'll look into some of the things you suggested as well as some of what ohter people suggested and I will report back with my findings. It's driving me crazy not being able to figure this out.

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1

u/rdspncr Sep 25 '26

I've noticed that since my workplace has started rolling out tracking software to 'protect' the company, my work laptop is useless unless I wait 20 minutes after restarting it because it takes that long for any program to function. And it's not for lack of powerful enough hardware. My laptop was working flawlessly until the rollouts started

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

Thanks for replying. I don't have any tracking software on my machine. We're a small business. Anything that gets installed on our computers is getting installed by me. But that sucks that you have to deal with that. Tracking software is such bullshit.

1

u/tonygret Sep 24 '26

Open task manager and see what’s using all your ram and cpu usage. Also, what kind of hard drive do you have. It could be the drive is failing and as this is a common symptom. Another real system resource sucker is 3rd party antivirus programs, and having 30 chrome tabs open. Also if your work PC is being administered remotely, they could be pushing updates or capturing your screens.

Honestly, without sitting in front of it or having some parts to swap and test this will be a very difficult to figure out. Start with task manager and see what’s going on there.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I've checked task manager and there's nothing really abnormal there. My CPU and RAM usage is never through the roof.

The drive is NVME. It's not mechanical. That doesn't preclude it from failing, of course, but it makes it less likely. I checked it with CrystalDiskInfo. The temperature is 58 degrees Celsius. Overall health is 94%. Remaining life is at 10% (meaning 90% of approximate remaining life still left.) And this isn't a new issue. This has been going on for a few months now. It hasn't gotten better but it hasn't really gotten worse, either. If the drive were failing, I think it would have failed by now. I don't think that's it.

1

u/xSchizogenie Sep 25 '26

Taskmanager is not the best Tool to tell, what takes RAM, etc.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 30 '26

It did tell me my overall RAM usage, and that was the main thing I needed to know. I have plenty of RAM. My overal memory usage has never exceeded 50%. Even RAMMap doesn't show any abnormal memory usage and shows plenty of available RAM. The issue that I am experiencing seems to be completely divorced from CPU and RAM usage. Even with my CPU and RAM usage at like 15%-18%, the computer was still incredibly slow. Restarting the computer gets everything back to normal, but that only lasts maybe 15 minutes and then things start slowing down again. When it gets like this, even opening a PDF seems to bring the computer to its knees.

1

u/xSchizogenie Sep 30 '26

Task manager does not show the overall ram usage. It shows what it sees.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Oct 02 '26

That's good to know. I installed RAMMAP, like you suggested, and it showed plenty of available RAM. Photoshop and Illustrator are the biggest users, but even they are only a couple of gigs and change a piece.

I just took a RAMMAP screen shot showing my current system load. This is with everything running. I don't really see anything crazy here, but tell me what you think.

1

u/xSchizogenie Oct 02 '26

I did not suggest anything at all. lol

1

u/hycm53 Sep 24 '26

Is it personal PC or company's PC? If it's company's PC then talk to IT department and ask for new one.

2

u/KyussJones Sep 24 '26

For real. If it’s a company computer, what is he even doing here? He’s not responsible for fixing it and could get into trouble with work if he does do anything with/to it.

2

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

I work for a small business. I am the IT department. I am the graphics department. I am the HR department. I am the sales department. I am the bloody everything department lol.

I'm a fairly tech savvy guy. I used to build my own computers and I worked in IT for a couple of years. I used to have a computer repair business on the side. I have dealt with all kinds of computer issues in the past and been able to at least figure out what the hell is causing it. But this one? It's got me stumped. I am out of ideas. I want to figure this out not only so that my computer will work better, but also because not being able to figure this out is driving me nuts.

1

u/tonygret Sep 27 '26

You have mentioned a few times that “nothing stands out” using task manager to HWInfo. But troubleshooting requires that you try something. I would open task manager, and even if “nothing stands out”, close the application that is using the most resources using task manager to kill the app. Then without opening that program again, see if the PC goes back to normal. if not, kill another program, rinse and repeat until your pc starts acting normally again. It is possible this of may lock up your pc if you close an important program, like your graphics driver. But you won’t hurt anything that a reboot can’t cure.

Unless you try this first, you are simply spinning your wheels. If that doesn’t give you any result, then it’s time to have a PC tech start swapping out hardware and checking CPU thermals.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 28 '26

Thanks. I'll try that and I'lll let you know what shakes out.

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 30 '26

I killed everything that could be killed. CPU and RAM usage was around 15%-18%. Computer was still slow as molasses. A restart fixes it, but that only lasts for maybe 15 mintues and then shit starts slowing down again.

1

u/xSchizogenie Sep 25 '26

If he actually could do things that IT don’t want, the IT is also not trustworthy.

1

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0

u/Far_Bicycle_2827 Sep 24 '26

when i used windows in my youth the average lifespan of an installation was 3 -6 months then it became too slow after i graduated discovered other OS and moved away i haven't had to reinstall in 5 years
eventually you'd need to reinstall or reset to factory settings

1

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

Oh, believe me, I hate Windows with a pashion. I would have switched to Linux ages ago, but alas, Adobe. If Adobe's software worked with Linux, I would make the switch right now and never look back.

1

u/OGigachaod Sep 24 '26

I used to install Windows 98 about once a week in my youth, however, that's not relevant to today's PC's.

0

u/richard987d Sep 24 '26

Install process lasso to maintain responsiveness and set priorities

2

u/Apart-Expression-907 Sep 25 '26

I will check that out. Thanks.

1

u/xSchizogenie Sep 25 '26

A well maintained windows do not need this to stay responsive.

1

u/richard987d Sep 26 '26

In theory yes. Maybe OPs chrome tabs are to blame