I’ve been running my laptop for over a month now and it has been great. Two days ago, my laptop crashed while I was working. When it restarted, it was incredibly slow - opening new windows took 1 minute +.
After a day of this, I decided to reinstall windows 11 (the same OS that was running fine for over a month) as I thought it was due windows 11 since it is new. We’ll, after the install, the computer is still very slow and I’m not sure what to do. It’s not usable in the current state due to how long it takes. I saw a thread on clock speed being .39 - I’m seeing my clock speed read 2.8 which is slower than what it was…I think :(.
I’ll continue my search for a solution but thought I’d post here to see if anyone knows of a possible fix or things to try. I’m not much of a hardware guy so not sure off hand.
This is the configuration of the laptop:
Intel Core i7-1165G7
WiFi 6E Ax210 no vPro
1TB WD_Black SN850 NVMe
64GB (2x32GB) DDR4-3200
I don’t know what the issue is, but here are a variety of troubleshooting ideas:
Are any programs running and using the CPU constantly (or any other resource)?
Does the issue persist when you boot and run the computer with no expansion cards installed?
Are CPU temperatures unusually high? A fairly simply program you can use to view these is HWMonitor.
Could you describe the slowness a bit more? Opening a file explorer window takes one minute, or, say, a Photoshop window? Any input latency? Any particular programs run significantly slower than others? Maybe this info will reveal potential causes.
2.8 GHz is the base clock speed for the processor. This is normal. It may boost higher under load.
CPU Utilization - I looked at this after it crached and before reinstalling the OS. I didn’t notice any out of the ordinary regarding CPU, memory, disk, wifi, or gpu.
Expansion Cards - Thanks for the idea. I took them out and restarted but still slow. I’ll do more testing with this though.
Temps - Thanks for the suggested tool. I’ve installed this and I’ll monitor the temps, currently the max temps per CPU range between 43 to 48, which seems normal.
More on the issue:
I was working, as I had been the same as the previous 30 days (give or take). All of a sudden the laptop crashed and just turned off. After a while (5-10 minutes), I was able to get it restarted and it was incredibly slow. Slow as in 60 to 120 + seconds to open any programs such as file explore, programs, edge, etc. I tried restarting several times, windows updates, restore points, etc. and nothing helped. So I made the decision to reinstall the OS.
Since reinstalling the OS, the computer is slow, but not as slow as it was. Opening file explorer takes 10 + seconds, wherease before it was near instantanicly. Opening edge with nothing else running, takes 15+ seconds.
I’m responding and using my backup laptop which is a surface laptop 3, Intel core i7-1065G7 1.3 GHz, 16 GB ram, 500 GB ssd; running edge with 100 + open tabs (most are sleeping), netflix running, github, visual studio, outlook, word, onenote, powerpoint, google chat, slack, excel, and many other apps, and when I switch apps, it’s instant response, with no delays. This is what I saw on the Frame.Work prior to the crash.
Thanks again for all of your suggestions. I’ll give these and other things I find a try to see what i can find out.
If you boot a live cd image from a usb flash drive (ventoy works very well for this) is the system still slow? If not, then it may point to the WD drive. I believe that there was a firmware update for it that you might try applying as well. If it is still slow, I would try removing one stick of ram, restarting and checking speed, then removing that stick and putting the other one in, and again checking speed. Good luck, I can imagine that it is frustrating.
Hey @lbkNhubert , thanks for the info. I’ll give your suggestions a try.
I’ve not yet had much time to focus on it but have tried a few things while take breaks from work. Last night I had it running on battery and it went to sleep after a period of no use. When I woke this morning and started to work with it, the performace seems back to normal. I did and currently do have all of the expansion cards out thanks to @Jacob_Padgett advise. The battery level is currently at 45% - one thread I saw had mention to battery levels lower than 85% where perforance returned.
Anyways, Thanks again for all of the suggestions. I’ll continue to test things out to see what happens.
This isn’t solid info but it’s the only thing I can trace back to the solution - which seems odd but it’s working.
The other night when I had the expension cards out and running on battery, it eventually went to sleep due to inactivity. The following morning I started it up and it seemed to respond as normal. The expension cards still out and running on battery (battery level was around 45% when I started it back up). I put in the expansion cards and plugged it in and since, it’s been fine. When I open new apps such as file explorer, edge, etc, it’s near instantaneously.
Outside of this, I didn’t do anything. I’m at a loss to explain it further but it’s working, at least for now.
Thanks again for all of the feedback and suggestions. I’ll continue to explore more and look into the firmware updates, etc.
@lbkNhubert there was a firmware update for this drive. Thanks for the suggestion.
For others that may happen across this thread and wonder how to update the firmware on the drive, I downloaded the Western Digital Dashboard ( Software and Firmware Downloads | WD Support (wdc.com)) and under tools, there is an option to update the firmware. Very easy.
I also had a similar problem. I have the i5 model, batch 5. My laptop also has the 500GB WD SN850 drive. The computer is running Pop OS 21.10, and until now it has been much faster than my i7 Lenovo X1 Carbon.
Today, though, when I went to use it, it was unreasonably slow, taking multiple seconds just to open “files” windows. Likewise, I have Windows 10 in a Boxes VM, which usually starts up in about 10 seconds, and this was still on the startup screen after several minutes.
I noticed that the SSD was 95% full, and though that might be it, so I started moving things off of it onto an external drive, but performance did not improve even after freeing up a reasonable amount of spacce. I decided to reboot, which was a mistake, because after the reboot, the startup was so slow that it was still not showing me the login screen even after 10 minutes.
Before I rebooted, I checked htop, but nothing unusual was running (qemu was eating up processor time after I started boxes, but that’s to be expected). Still, the fans were not running.
I only have USB C, USB A, and HDMI modules, and I was only using USB-C for power/video and USB-A for the external drive I was moving stuff to.
After reading this, I removed all except one USB-C, powered off, and powered on again. This did not seem to do anything useful, as it was still to slow to even start up.
Finally, I went into the BIOS and used the “Disconnect battery” option. I pressed the power button a few times, connected power (which caused the power button to blink red!), and then pressed it long enough to cause the laptop to start up - perfectly fast this time.
So I think the take-away might be that it could be some BIOS issue, potentially causes by the SSD? maybe? but using the “disconnect battery” option seems to have fixed it. I have a feeling that the fans were just not spinning when they should have been. I installed xsensors to have a look in the future should this happen again.
Have been having similar problems to OP, thought i’d post incase someone comes across this.
Before i found this thread i was running HWinfo, System health checks, virus scans, repairing drives etc etc and everything appeared fine. The only thing that i might have noticed out of the ordinary was that the fans weren’t spinning, or spinning so lightly that it was almost indiscernable. Temps on HWinfo were hovering at around 50 C so it was a bit strange, usually running various full system virus scans on the laptop makes the fans pick up spead, but none of that was happening. It was like the system was thermal throtteling at 50 C with lower core clocks for some reason… Which was why this comment with regards to power made me consider it was more likely something with the battery:
This seemed to work for me, kinda.
I checked the battery disconect option and hit save and quit in the BIOS. Now, it had said that it would restart but it didn’t. So I turned it on manually again and unfortunately Windows was doing exactly the same thing.
In my frustration, I unplugged the USBC power to even check if the option for battery disconect had even registered. It had, because the laptop immedietely turned off.
I then plugged the cable back in and manually turned the laptop back on and… it’s fine. It’s literally back to normal as if there was never any problem… here i am typing this message with everything working as it should. What is strange (?), i just unplugged the USBC power again and the system remained on? Perhaps the BIOS setting for battery disconect only works on the immediete restart, idk.
But yeah everything is working fine… kinda. This happened before about 2 months ago. I seem to remember going through the same process but after a normal restart the issue fixed itself. Which leads me to believe that there is no reason why this won’t happen again.
I don’t have an SN850, I have the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, so i’m not sure if that’s causing an issue but i’ll look into it. If this happens in the future, i’ll update here.
Just piping in here to say (a) I have almost the exact same setup, including the OS and framework batch, (b) I too experienced this exact issue and (c) the battery disconnect in the BIOS seemed to do the trick.
The only thing I’d consider adding is that it might be a battery health issue related to leaving the computer on for some time plugged into power. That was at least the precondition that occurred with me right before seeing this issue. I’m also loosely aware that some vendors/OS’s will attempt to slow down compute if it detects unhealthy batteries. Feels related to me at least.
I also had the same problem. After a crash/hard reboot the system went was slow.
I’m reporting this issue because I think it’s a bug (BIOS?).
The problem is OS independent (I check different OS) and already is a problem during the Boot sequence.
Rebooting did not change anything. On thing that was striking … the fans did not turn on during boot or OS activity.
I ran a HWiNFO session to check for strange behavior. See screengrab “slow”:
Striking is that the cores run only at 399Mhz and never go any higher than that.
This might be an indication on the source of the problem?
Also the Windows task mananger only states 5-7% activity.
This speed does match with the (very slow) responsiveness of the system.
I tumbled upon this thread and used the BIOS Battery Disconnect setting.
Disconnected the power, so the system got a hard shutdown.
Rebooted, and it seemed not to work at first.
I also turned the max battery charge limit from 60- > 100%, turned OFF the disconnect.
Rebooted and the system was back at normal speed.
Well it’s been a while, but I thought i’d update quickly incase this is relevant.
It seems that this case was the start of a number of problems with my framework, and particularly my mainboard. I’m not sure if this is related, but soon after this issue, some of the USB ports stopped working properly. Some of the ports didn’t work at all. This wasn’t an expansion card issue, it was with the board itself.
Anyway I ended up contacting support and they asked me to do a bunch of things including reseting the mainboard state (disconecting the battery, RTC cell etc) and then for photos of the mainboard. I took this photo which revealed a part of the board which had seemingly burnt out;
So they offered me a replacment on warranty. I don’t know if that was the start of the issues, or if this was entirely unrelated to what’s been going on in this thread or whatever else. Best of luck!
