Win10 odd display lag

[porina]

This one has me stumped. Using a desktop everything seems to work, but the display is not as responsive as it should be. Things take longer to draw than normal, and when it is bad, you can see it drawing. As an example, there is a noticeable pause of a good fraction of a second changing between Task Manager tabs. If I have a File Explorer window open, and try to resize it, it feels really slow to respond. If I drag the same window and move it around, it feels kinda like a low Hz display, but I have checked the connected monitor is running at 60 Hz refresh rate. Moving the mouse pointer around feels normal for 60 Hz.

 

System hardware:

Dell something or other (work supplied PC)

i7-8700 not-K

2x8GB ram

GTX1060 - 1080p60 monitor connected by DVI

Intel GPU also enabled but not connected. I can't find a way to disable this in bios.

Some SSD for OS

 

Software:

Win10 1903 64-bit

Using Dell software, updated everything I can, including system bios

Using Windows Update, everything is up to date

Latest nvidia Creator driver installed today - didn't use DDU but did select "clean install" in the driver installer.

 

Other things I have tried:

Run DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth, and sfc /scannow. The latter reported finding and fixing errors, but this didn't help.

Changing the power plan from Dell to High Performance might have helped a bit.

If I have GPU-Z running twice, one showing the Intel GPU, one for the 1060, and do stuff, I can see activity on the 1060 and not Intel.

Looking at task manager, I don't see anything else running while it is going slow.

 

Can't try using only Intel GPU to see if that makes a difference. The mobo only has HDMI and DP connectors, and I don't have cables for those.

 

I could try DDU the drivers but that will have to wait as it is in use at the moment (can't reboot). Reinstalling OS is not an option. Any other ideas?

[Lipe123]

Is it cpu related?

 

Did you run a resource monitor to see what happens when you move windows or click tabs?

 

On a related note, I have myster issues with multiple screens and office 2013 apps, when dragging them on other than the primary screen its insanely slow. I've have to mess with the appearance/performance settings to not show windows contents when dragging to work around the issue.

[porina]

13 minutes ago, Lipe123 said:

Is it cpu related?

I don't have evidence of that. The usage in % might or might not be high, as I've not compared to other working systems yet.

 

13 minutes ago, Lipe123 said:

Did you run a resource monitor to see what happens when you move windows or click tabs?

No. but I can try that.

 

13 minutes ago, Lipe123 said:

On a related note, I have myster issues with multiple screens and office 2013 apps, when dragging them on other than the primary screen its insanely slow. I've have to mess with the appearance/performance settings to not show windows contents when dragging to work around the issue.

Single monitor in use here. I have had funny behaviour with MS Office previously. At the time it was a known problem with it an high refresh displays, no workaround other than to lower refresh rate. I don't know if things have moved on since then.

[porina]

On 8/8/2019 at 5:21 PM, Lipe123 said:

Did you run a resource monitor to see what happens when you move windows or click tabs?

Finally got around to messing around with the system today. Resource monitor is really sluggish, so whatever is the problem, it is triggering it big time.

 

I also turned on "show kernel times" in task manager, and that gave another clue. Kernel time is almost all the time. Looking at DPC latency also gave a high result, so I'm thinking it might be pointing towards a bad driver install. I have already reinstalled the GPU driver without change, so time to work through the rest...

[porina]

On 8/8/2019 at 2:45 PM, porina said:

Reinstalling OS is not an option.

Since nothing else I tried worked, today I bit the bullet and hit the "reset Windows" button for the first time ever. It's practically a clean install if I understand it correctly. I didn't have many apps installed on the system anyway, and used the "keep user files" option for the small amount of stuff I had on there. After the nuke, it was as responsive as it should be. I'm not sure it is as fast as it could be, but it is now usable.

 

It kept my keyboard and mouse settings, but seemed to have reset everything else so I started putting it back to how I like it. First phase, let Windows Updates get on with it. Didn't take long and all was fine after. Next phase, I let the Dell tool do its updates, but manually picked them one at a time so I can tell if a particular one caused problems. That more or less went without problem. The only oddity is Intel Rapid Storage driver wont install. There is some version already running so I just left it. Finally I let nvidia drivers update. All still working ok at the end of it. 

 

It left a file on the desktop listing all the apps that were nuked in the process. There were a few driver entries in there, like Intel serial IO that it didn't install after. Maybe one of those were the culprit. I think they came pre-installed on the system.

 

I never got to the bottom of why it went slow, but at least it confirms it was a software problem and an OS reset fixed it.