I have been dealing with this problem for months.
The Computer
- Model: Dell XPS M1330 (specs found here; I have the full 4GB of RAM)
- Age: 3+ years
- OS: Windows 7 Professional x64
Problem Investigation
One day I noticed that my computer was intermittently experiencing major slowdowns. It was to the point where there are sometimes several seconds of delay between me pressing a key and the character appearing on the screen. At first I thought that a Chrome update was causing the browser to eat all of my CPU, but eventually I figured out it was happening even when Chrome wasn't open. Finally I got the bright idea to use the Resource Monitor and noticed that Windows was routinely throttling my CPU to 25%.
What I've Tried
- I checked the health of my disk drive and ran pretty much every system maintenance utility that Windows ships with and the problem persisted.
- I have systematically played with power settings
- After some Google searching, I found out that the most common reason for this is overheating. So I did the following:
- Had all my fans cleaned
- Had the thermal paste on the heatsinks replaced
- Used SpeedFan to confirm that temperatures are all normal (except for the GPU, which is apparently normal for this model).
The problem persists. In fact, sometimes it's even worse now. If I really need to I'll suck it up and buy a new one, but I would like advice on how to proceed from here.
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