This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
First I'll describe the problem, then give the background.
The problem is that a Windows 10 computer usually is very unresponsive. Clicking on anything, the blue circle will spin, then stop. Then 10-20 seconds later the app will start to come up, but slowly. The row of icons will appear at a rate of about 3 per second. Often when I try to type into it, the characters don't appear - until several seconds later, then they will suddenly show up.
I've looked at task manager, and it is showing periods of high CPU use, and it is in these periods when it us unresponsive. The main things using the CPU are "system", "service host: diagnostic policy service" and "service host: Windows event log". See the attached screen capture from Task Manager. When the CPU use is 20% or higher, it is unresponsive.
Background: I got a used HP Z620 last week (two 8-core Xeons, 64GB of RAM). It came with Windows 7 and was working fine. I tried to upgrade it to Windows 10, but it got into a boot loop. I took it into the computer repair shop, and they did a reinstall of Windows 10. But when I got it back, it had this problem. It would come and go - see the Task Manager image, which shows 4 minutes. I left it on overnight last night, and this morning the task manager was flat at or near 0%, and it was responding normally. When I came back after lunch, it had rebooted and the problem was back, except worse. Now all (or almost all) of the time the CPU use is high and it is unresponsive. The repair shop guarantees their work, but I'm wondering if there is a quicker solution.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Someone suggested LatencyMon. In periods when I was not having the problem, it didn't show much. But it showed something when I was having the problem, but the response was not good enough to save the screenshot. I just managed to get a screenshot and save it. I'm not using audio for anything and haven't heard problems.
Did you upgrade desktop motherboard with Xeon? Unfortunately this may cause some problems of itself.
Now most of the time this website won't let me post replies. I press SUBMIT but it gives a red circle with a line, and won't post it. Why?
No, it came with the Xeon's, and didn't have this problem until right after I tried to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10, couldn't get it done, and had a repair place do it.
Someone suggested Chkdsk, but I couldn't find how to run that as admin (Windows has hidden it somewhere). However, I ran HDTune overnight, which does a more thorough analysis, and it didn't find a problem.
Now here is something strange - I rebooted and started HDTune when it wasn't having the problem. Of course, HDTune makes heavy use of the HD. After about a half hour, I could see on Task Manager that the things that take up a lot of CPU had started, as they always do, but now the system was reasonably responsive! As responsive as you would expect with HDTune running.
I rebooted again within the last hour, and it was OK, until the problem started again after about 32 minutes.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(256, 10%, 34%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EIL%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Did you upgrade desktop motherboard with Xeon? Unfortunately this may cause some problems of itself.
"The problem started intermittently again. The screenshot is below, resource meter sorted by CPU. "
I have experienced similar symptoms with HDD problems. First do a CHKDSK /R (there are other options but this verifies everything is readable and repairs bad spots). Regardless, it may be an intermittent logic board of the HDD, so if you can - clone the drive to another one and see if you run consistently from that point. If the HDD had bad spots - you would find delays from re-reads of data. Another area to check is the Error Log for System Errors and if there are entries causing dumps, that would appear as delays and disk activity (can be made not to create dumps, or limit the size). I did not study the graphs due to available time, so it's another way of looking at performance.
Please use third-party LatencyMon program for diagnosis.
I've had that computer off for a couple of days while I worked on another one. But I downloaded LatencyMon. I ran it while I was having the problem and it said something about audio problems and update the BIOS and turn off CPU throttling in the BOIS. (Is that Turbo mode - I REALLY need turbo mode on the Xeons with the slow basic rate). But with the problem and with LatencyMon running, I couldn't paste a screen capture or open a text editor to tell what it said.
I rebooted and it didn't have the problem. I ran LatencyMon again and it didn't give the same message. It just put the maximum latency at 142 microseconds. But the BIOS was 5 years old, so I updated it. After rebooting, it has been running for 12 minutes w/o the problem, but it can take half an hour to an hour to start having the problem, so I'm waiting....
