Z3-715 extremely slow - 100% disk and ram usage often through very light-duty activities

Background: 4 year old device, used in home office, almost exclusively as a work device for web browsing and word processing - no taxing activities. I realized there were compromises in an AIO, but given the light-duty work, and the desire for a streamlined look, it seemed a fair compromise.

At this point though I'm on the verge of throwing this thing out the window, and would have already if I was using it more often (rather than my wife). It literally takes 10 minutes to change between user accounts. Once changed over, it's another 10-20 minutes before the latency subsides and the computer is usable. If I need to log on quick to handle a work matter and my wife is logged on, it's almost an impossiblity.

Desperately looking for something I can do from a settings standpoint, or even hardware, to make this box usable.

Thanks!

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Jack22

@AIO123
Try doing Clean Boot , which is given in the below link
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

billsey

Check your antivirus, especially if you have one installed that is no longer licensed or used. They often will drag a system down significantly. Uninstall any that aren't being used, even if you think they are turned off.

Next, use Task Manager and Resource Monitor to look at what your memory usage is and what your disk usage is. Often if you are near the verge of using all the system memory (so, say 7.8GB on an 8GB system) the OS will start to swap unused tasks to the HDD. Needless to say the HDD is a *lot* slower than system memory is.

You have a machine that is running on the 6th generation Intel chipset, using 2133MHz memory. Typically Intel does a generation each year and they are currently selling the 11th generation with the 12th generation either just announced or just about to be announced (since Acer showed a 12th gen machine recently). The 11th gen memory is 2933MHz, the 12th gen 3200MHz, so both quite a bit faster than yours.

Now... Once we've done what we can to figure out what's slowing you down, we can look at what to do to keep it running at full capacity for as long as possible. If you are running out of system memory then the obvious first choice is to bump that up a bit. Running Windows 10 for low impact apps as you describe I'd be comfortable at 8GB of memory and breathe even easier with 16GB. If you are still running on a HDD I'd look really seriously at a SSD to replace it as your system device. You have an M.2 slot that supports SATA SSDs and one of those will be a huge increase in speed over any HDD. If those two changes don't get you running smoothly then the next step is really to look at a replacement. I'm betting however that going through this exercise will get it comfortable again.

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