Computer fine for gaming but slow for simple tasks?

[dyre]

Hey escapists,

I've had this issue for awhile and I figured I'd get off my ass and confront it...

I have an Asus G75 (basically, a pretty capable last-gen laptop) which runs Crysis just fine (and more impressively, Witcher 2 on lowish-medium settings), but for some reason simple tasks like opening MS Word or saving a picture from Chrome will take waaay longer than it should.

I mean, it used to be pretty much instantaneous when I first got the laptop, and now it takes like 30 seconds, which still isn't the end of the world, but it's way longer than a laptop of this caliber should take.

So basically, my computer is still capable of running very demanding video games (so it's probably not a bloatware issue or a virus issue - in any case Malwarebyes says I'm fine when it comes to the latter), but takes an unreasonable amount of time to open Word.

Any ideas on the root cause / potential solutions?

Thanks in advance

 

[SnarkyJ]

Check your memory usage when you're trying to do a task. Maybe something in the background is hogging ram?

Use task manager to observe, also try to minimize startup items on Windows by tweaking msconfig

 

[dyre]

Thanks, I've checked for useless programs running in the background, but CPU usage is pretty low overall. And again, I run pretty demanding games just fine.

I don't think it's a startup issue (though I've messed with msconfig in the past), since I mostly just hibernate my computer when I don't use it.

 

[Supernova1138]

How are your loading times for games? Are they slow too? If that's the case, it's probably your hard drive slowing you down. Most laptops only have a 5400RPM hard drive, which is rather slow, and the hard drive will work even slower if you run on any sort of 'power saver' power profile. The best fix for the hard drive issue would be to pop in an SSD, but that can get quite expensive if you need a lot of storage space.

 

[dyre]

How are your loading times for games? Are they slow too? If that's the case, it's probably your hard drive slowing you down. Most laptops only have a 5400RPM hard drive, which is rather slow, and the hard drive will work even slower if you run on any sort of 'power saver' power profile. The best fix for the hard drive issue would be to pop in an SSD, but that can get quite expensive if you need a lot of storage space.

Looks like you're right - I looked up my hard drive serial number, and it's 5400 RPM. And my load times can be pretty mediocre now that I think about it.

So "popping in" an SSD would involve opening my laptop and literally taking a the older drive out, and putting in the new one, right? Craaaaaaap.

Thanks for your help though, clears up some confusion.

 

[renegade7]

Check your RAM and drive health. CPU usage isn't always a great indicator of resource drain.

Also look to see if there's anything in particular using up system resources, a lot of applications like Chrome and Firefox have known memory leakage issues. Check also that you're not running on some kind of power saver or low-heat mode, since those will limit CPU and RAM frequency and won't tell you in the system resources page.