[RANT] Arrg. (It's all good) (fixed SSD speed issue too)

[VirtualLarry]

And as usual, he blames me for every little thing going on with his PC.

Of course, I told him to look out for anything "unusual" going on with his PC.

So, persistent 25% CPU usage, twitch streams not loading, other things, he reports.

Nothing, that I know of, that would be caused by adding more RAM.

The 25% CPU usage was from svchost.exe, and WU. (He has it set to automatically download and let him choose to install.) Since I rebooted his PC several times after installing the RAM, this triggered a WU check.

He doesn't understand that WU churns in the background, chewing up one of his four CPU cores, before showing him the available updates. He thinks it takes zero CPU, because he doesn't normally watch it.

He also complained about watching streams, taking 50% of his CPU. (On an Athlon II X4)

Well, if WU is chewing in the background, what do you expect.

I guess it was my mistake, thinking that someone that doesn't know the difference between RAM and HDD space, would be able to give me any worthwhile diagnostic info.

Edit: Interestingly, he hasn't been prompted to upgrade to Windows 10 yet.

I guess, it would be nice if my friend was grateful for me upgrading his RAM from 4GB to 16GB gratis. Instead, he treats me like I'm a PITA, and I'm the reason for his high CPU usage.

I dunno, is there some bug with Windows 7 64-bit, where it takes more CPU time, when there is 16GB of RAM present? I have a Haswell G1820 Celeron rig with 16GB of RAM, and I didn't notice anything anomalous.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

No bugs like that. But yeah, WU is a dog and getting Doggier.

With friends like this, who needs clients?

 

[Ken g6]

I actually did have a situation where adding more RAM seemed to slow down a computer. A 486SX 25MHz. When I upgraded the RAM from 4MB to 8MB for Netscape Navigator, it seemed to get slower.

Of course, this was a long time ago. And I might have misremembered the numbers.

 

[Ketchup]

Tell your "friend" to leave the computer running overnight and let Windows updates do it's thing. It will probably be fine tomorrow.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Take your RAM back and apologize for being so incompetent (you aren't). Hopefully he won't call on you ever again.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Tell your "friend" to leave the computer running overnight and let Windows updates do it's thing. It will probably be fine tomorrow.

Yeah, that's what I figure too.

I was just talking with him, and he sent me his Task Manager Processes window.

System idle process 34
svchost.exe 25
plugin-container.exe *32 14
FlashPlayer_Plugin_20_0_0_30... 13
firefox.exe *32 11
System 02
(all the rest, 00)

Other than the svchost.exe pinning one CPU core of his quad-core at 100%, which I'm pretty sure is WU, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I actually did have a situation where adding more RAM seemed to slow down a computer. A 486SX 25MHz. When I upgraded the RAM from 4MB to 8MB for Netscape Navigator, it seemed to get slower.

Of course, this was a long time ago. And I might have misremembered the numbers.

There were issues with large RAM amounts, and cache SRAM / cache tags on cheaper motherboards. If you had to put in a large amount of RAM, you had to change out the cache chips too, otherwise some of the RAM ended up uncached (slow).

I was sort of wonder if that could be what's happening here, but I didn't think that happened with processors with IMCs and integrated on-die caching.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Take your RAM back and apologize for being so incompetent (you aren't). Hopefully he won't call on you ever again.

Well, the worst part is, the upgrade was kind of my idea. He's complained about slowdown before, and one time, when I installed a high-power wifi for him to borrow his neighbor's internet (since his is down right now), his PC did seem... very strangely slow. But that was before the RAM upgrade.

I think that his rig might have some issues, but whether they are hardware or software-related, I'm not sure. The mobo is from 2007-2008, it's an Athlon II X4 CPU, and he used to only have 4GB of RAM, which, after uptimes of maybe a month or more, his Commit Charge started to creep over 4GB, so I figured more RAM would speed it up.

As far as the current issues, it seems like the main problem is WU using up resources.

He was like, "it never took this long to update before". I was like, "You were on your 100Mbit+ wired connection before too, not some 8Mbit wifi, while trying to watch video streams".

Oh well, I think I assuaged him enough that he's comfortable with his computer again. I told him it might take 24hrs for WU to work through the updates.

Earlier, he was like, "70% CPU usage? OMG! PC's gonna explode~!"

Edit: Also, I benchmarked his SSD, a Crucial 120GB M500. Not the fastest drive out there, but supposedly reliable.
Seq read: 161MB/sec, Seq write 121MB/sec
4K read: 21MB/sec, 4K write ~60MB/sec
4K 32Thr was basically almost identical to 4K, which is probably because the OS was installed with the SSD set to IDE mode.

Which, I would have said was my mistake, but in actuality, that was on purpose, it was a compromise because he used to have an XP install on a HDD that he wanted to be able to dual-boot. I thought that it would be easier for him, to do so, if he just had to choose a boot drive, rather than keep track of and also change the AHCI mode every time he dual-booted as well.

I should probably tell him it might be time for a re-format, and this time, do it in AHCI mode. Either that, or get a 3rd-party SATA6G AHCI PCI-E controller card (I have in stock), and put his boot SSD on that, might speed things up. His mobo is SATA2, and AMD 780G/SB700 or SB710 at that.

At one point I was willing to give him a G3258 CPU / H81 board / DDR3 RAM, and give him a nice platform upgrade, but he didn't want to swap it out. Which, I guess, if it required a re-format, I don't blame him.

He doesn't realize how much faster PCs have gotten since 2008.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You know, I might be wrong about the 25% CPU usage by svchost.exe being WU. I guess I kind of assumed that it was, but... when doing updates, the memory used by that processes doesn't really increase, it stays at around 122MB. So maybe it's a bona-fide bug, something in his OS environment that's reacting to the new RAM or RAM amount.

My experience with WU is that it chews up RAM too, and it's not really doing that at all.

http://techietalkz.com/2010/03/08/solve-svchost-exe-high-cpu-usage-in-windows-7-how-to/

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...e/f275d2c7-14ea-440f-ac79-66e6a73c60d8?auth=1

 

[AnonymouseUser]

He was like, "it never took this long to update before". I was like, "You were on your 100Mbit+ wired connection before too, not some 8Mbit wifi, while trying to watch video streams".

That's probably all it is, and it doesn't excuse his attitude towards you. Don't lose any sleep over it, and don't offer any more assistance to upgrading that PC unless you do it entirely on your terms.

If you do perform the upgrade I would suggest copying all the data to a second drive, a complete wipe of the SSD and BIOS reset, install the OS to the SSD, and let him sort out the mess on the other drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That's probably all it is, and it doesn't excuse his attitude towards you. Don't lose any sleep over it, and don't offer any more assistance to upgrading that PC unless you do it entirely on your terms.

If you do perform the upgrade I would suggest copying all the data to a second drive, a complete wipe of the SSD and BIOS reset, install the OS to the SSD, and let him sort out the mess on the other drive.

He's got some HDDs installed, that he doesn't even really use. I could easily copy his files from the SSD, to the WD Black 500GB, and then re-format. If I did that, I would take the opportunity to add a SATA6G PCI-E card for the boot drive, and probably give him the 240GB BX200 drive I just recently picked up on sale for under $60.

Then again, I installed Crucial Storage Executive on his machine, and it said his SSD was only 2% worn out, a little over a year of straight usage. He's only using 60GB of space on his 120GB SSD too.

Edit: This is his board:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157154

Edit: Would a move from a 120GB M500 to a 240GB BX200 be an upgrade, or downgrade?

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5593/crucial-m500-120gb-ssd-review/index.html

According to that review, the M500 120GB model can push 500MB/sec sequential read speeds. I'm getting like 160MB/sec seq. reads in my friend's PC. Something's not right there either. Even SATAII shouldn't cap it that much, I wouldn't think. I would expect around 260-280MB/sec reads in that case.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6884/crucial-micron-m500-review-960gb-480gb-240gb-120gb

 

[XavierMace]

Larry, repeat after me:

No.

Two simple letters makes life so much better. LOL.

 

[bononos]

Well, the worst part is, the upgrade was kind of my idea. He's complained about slowdown before, and one time, when I installed a high-power wifi for him to borrow his neighbor's internet (since his is down right now), his PC did seem... very strangely slow. But that was before the RAM upgrade.
.......

Do you think it could be slow due to the disk/ssd (he's only got a 120Gb running on ide mode). A disk cleanup (cleanmgr) and removing restore points/shadow copies could help.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Edit: Also, I benchmarked his SSD, a Crucial 120GB M500. Not the fastest drive out there, but supposedly reliable.
Seq read: 161MB/sec, Seq write 121MB/sec
4K read: 21MB/sec, 4K write ~60MB/sec
4K 32Thr was basically almost identical to 4K, which is probably because the OS was installed with the SSD set to IDE mode.

There is at least part of your problem. IDE mode tends to be very CPU intensive, and kills drive performance.

This isn't usually a problem with regular spinning HDDs, they're pretty slow after all, but its a different matter with SSDs.

I can only imagine what its doing to that poor CPU trying to keep up with the SSD.

Which, I would have said was my mistake, but in actuality, that was on purpose, it was a compromise because he used to have an XP install on a HDD that he wanted to be able to dual-boot. I thought that it would be easier for him, to do so, if he just had to choose a boot drive, rather than keep track of and also change the AHCI mode every time he dual-booted as well.

I should probably tell him it might be time for a re-format, and this time, do it in AHCI mode. Either that, or get a 3rd-party SATA6G AHCI PCI-E controller card (I have in stock), and put his boot SSD on that, might speed things up. His mobo is SATA2, and AMD 780G/SB700 or SB710 at that.

All hope is not lost. You might be able to do a IDE-to-AHCI swap without touching anything else.

He doesn't realize how much faster PCs have gotten since 2008.

Few people do.

 

[Dahak]

Another tip is to use Process Explorer from SysInternals,
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/bb896653

This will at least tell you what services are being used by the svchost as that is just the generic name for the process that launches them.
And with that you could at least confirm that its WU or not.

But I would agree with the others, try to change it from IDE to SATA.

 

[sm625]

That wuauserv chunking away at the CPU for hours on end is really frickin annoying. In what world does it take 10+ trillion CPU cycles to check for updates? Yeah, pull the other one.... What a fool I am for expecting a $400 billion company to write better software than that. Think about it... a company has let's say say 100 machines. You turn on all of them at 8am and they sit there for 2 hours churning away at windows update all of them using a combined quadrillion cpu cycles just to check for updates! Not to make this a conspiracy, but that is some serious amount of cpu power doing seemingly nothing but it could infact be something nefarious right under our noses. A quadrillion cycles!

To put this in perspective, this 10 trillion cycles per machine is greater than the number of CPU cycles it takes to do a complete malwarebytes scan of a 128GB drive full of non-media files and 900,000 objects with hueristics and rootkit scanning.

 

[mikeymikec]

Another tip is to use Process Explorer from SysInternals,
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/bb896653

This will at least tell you what services are being used by the svchost as that is just the generic name for the process that launches them.
And with that you could at least confirm that its WU or not.

This helped me this morning, it turned out to be a different service that was having a problem (I had the choice between Windows audio, DHCP, event log and something else - not WU). Avast IS's firewall had malfunctioned, so my guess is that it was the DHCP service having issues as a result. I told Avast to repair its install, problems fixed.

OP, I wonder if your 'friend' has general WU problems considering the lack of W10 prompt; perhaps it got stuck on an earlier update? In any case I'd make it clear to him that copping an attitude is not going to generate sympathy for his situation.

As for the RAM question, I have a customer with 15GB RAM (yes, fifteen) on Win7 HP 64, no problems.

 

[VirtualLarry]

There is at least part of your problem. IDE mode tends to be very CPU intensive, and kills drive performance.

Not really. IDE mode doesn't imply PIO mode, it should be running in UDMA Mode 6, at least. You do lose NCQ though.

 

[WT]

If you are going to toss a PCIe SATA6 card into his PC, that will add to the boot time, as the card has to initialize at startup, so then he will be complaining about THAT !
It wasn't this sloooow befooooore ... ughhh, I even read line that using the whiner voice from the Rob Schneider SNL skits years back.

 

[redzo]

[RANT] Arrg. Helped a friend with more RAM. Now he thinks his PC is slowing way down.

At one point I was willing to give him a G3258 CPU / H81 board / DDR3 RAM, and give him a nice platform upgrade, but he didn't want to swap it out. Which, I guess, if it required a re-format, I don't blame him.

Blame him, for god's sake!
This guy, even if you somehow manage to magically solve his "issue", his inferior reasoning will not comprehend your time and effort spent into this
Your issue is that you are trying to reason with a too much of an idiot person. Good luck with that!

 

[CuriousMike]

I was like, "You were on your 100Mbit+ wired connection before too, not some 8Mbit wifi, while trying to watch video streams".

He's gone from 10MB/sec to 800KB/sec.
If he's sharing that bandwidth with anyone else in the house, that's probably the issue.

I had a family of 4 sharing a 600KB/sec DSL line and as soon as anyone streamed a YT video, everyone else suffered. It wasn't until we moved up to our 15MB/sec cable line that we can all stream simultaneously.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Not really. IDE mode doesn't imply PIO mode, it should be running in UDMA Mode 6, at least. You do lose NCQ though.

Who said anything about PIO mode? Anyway, your reported transfer rates most definitely tell me it's not running in PIO mode. Even PIO mode 4 is only 16.7MB/s.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Who said anything about PIO mode? Anyway, your reported transfer rates most definitely tell me it's not running in PIO mode. Even PIO mode 4 is only 16.7MB/s.

Yeah, I thought about it a bit more, and I think that you're right. Even using DMA mode, Ultra DMA Mode 6 is capped at around 160MB/sec I think, so that indeed might be the problem with the SSD benchmarks.

I stopped by briefly today, prepared to run Process Explorer if necessary, but the svchost.exe that was chewing up 25% CPU time was gone. I'm going to just assume that it indeed was something to do with WU, or possibly Windows Defender updates.

It's all good now, I didn't notice anything amiss with his system.

I explained to him some of the differences between IDE mode on the SSD and AHCI mode, and why I installed it originally in IDE mode (so he could dual-boot with XP). He was like, "Yeah, I still have XP on that other drive." I don't think that he's used it in several years though. Not sure if he still wants to keep it around or not.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

That motherboard has a built-in boot menu. Enable AHCI in Windows, then set the SSD to AHCI mode in the BIOS. Press F11 after post and choose the SSD as boot device. To boot into XP, press F11 and choose HDD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That motherboard has a built-in boot menu. Enable AHCI in Windows, then set the SSD to AHCI mode in the BIOS. Press F11 after post and choose the SSD as boot device. To boot into XP, press F11 and choose HDD.

Aren't you forgetting? XP doesn't have AHCI drivers. To boot into XP, my friend would have to change the SATA port mode to IDE again, and then select the boot drive, and then boot into XP. Too complex for him, sorry.