So this is a bit of a tricky one for me. Recently I've noticed that when I launch any application whatsoever, there is about a 15 second delay before the program actually starts loading. It could be a coincidence but I feel that it started happening around the last windows update. I haven't done much troubleshooting about it as I'm not really sure where to start. The only thing I have really tried is disabling ALL non essential programs from startup and done a fresh reboot to see whether there was a clear third party program installed that was causing it. Oh, I also double checked all my bios settings to make sure my RAM speeds and everything were correct. Anyone know where I should start looking?
Just wIndows apps from their app store, or all apps even independent ones? What's the disk and CPU usage look like in task manager while this is happening?
All apps, whether it be a game, web browser or absolutely everything - actually now that I think about it, the only thing that does not appear to be affected is task manager. CPU and Drives are literally at idle, I'll click to open a browser for example while keeping a close eye on active processes using task manager and nothing happens for like 15 seconds. The moment I see it pop up in the task manager the app appears on the screen. So it's not like the loading part is taking too long, more like the system is just not responding to my requests immediately. It's super strange. I've removed all unwanted or unnecessary programs from the computer, checked fragmentation levels on all drives (except the main ssd), and ran a registry cleaner. I checked my power management settings and can confirm that I still have my CPU minimum power state at 100%
If you have any regular spinning rust mechanical HDD's, run chkdsk /f /r on all of them. Then run hddscan to see if any bad sectors have turned up. That sort of delay is what I associate with a bad sector being in one of the system files, though it can obviously happen in other ways. Worth doing regardless.
