- Performance issues are one of the hardest types of problems to diagnose and troubleshoot because the symptoms of poor performance have a wide variety of causes
- Check for overheating
- If the temperature is too high, the CPU and other components are likely to reduce the performance level to avoid overheating
- referred to as throttling
- Check temperature sensors and fan speeds
- If these are high, check whether the computer needs cleaning or if cooling systems need to be replaced or upgraded
- Check for misconfigurations
- If symptom is after a new build or after an upgrade or maintenance, verify the compatibility of new components with the motherboard
- E.g., a memory upgrade might result in the computer no longer using dual-channel mode, reducing performance
- ask the question “What has changed?”
- Verify the problem
- PC has compute, storage, and networking functions
- Any of these three may be the source of sluggish performance
- use diagnostic tests to compare performance of the CPU, system memory, fixed disk, and network adapter to known performance baselines
- Quantifying what “sluggish” really means and isolating the issue to a particular subsystem will help to identify the probable cause
- If the system performance is not sufficient, one or more subsystems can be upgraded
- Rule out operating system/app/configuration/networking issues
- Users might describe a computer’s performance as sluggish when in fact there is a configuration problem
- E.g., a computer might seem to be unresponsive and lead the user to say, “My computer is slow,” but the issue is caused by a faulty network login script, and the fault does not actually lie in the computer
- rule out issues with the operating system and apps before assuming that there is a hardware issue
- use a built-in or third-party diagnostic suite to verify the performance of individual components
- If the diagnostic tool does not indicate a problem, suspect a software/configuration issue