Why is my PC so slow/unusable (at everything)???

[Marcus96]

Hello, I am not sure if any of you guys have any idea what is wrong with my computer here, however it would be a big help if anybody could myth-bust the issues I am experiencing?

I have only just started to notice this recently, however with everything I try to do on my computer, I notice that my laptop struggles to hold-up to it's tasks (even though I have only started to try to pursue these).

The following issues that I am having include:

-Whenever I try to watch YouTube in 1080p, the video is very jerky and the image keeps freezing for a second or so.
-There is no 720p60 or 1080p60 (60fps) option in YouTube (I am using the most updated version of Mozilla Firefox).
-When running simple emulators, mainly SNES9X and ePSXe, I can run the games at a steady and smooth 60fps. However when I start using Fraps, they struggle to obtain 30-40fps.

My computer specs are quite decent too, which are:

Acer Aspire 5738G
Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 @ 2.20GHz
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
1TB 7200rpm SSHD Drive (recently swapped from an old 320GB 5200rpm HDD)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD4570 512MB
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit

It would be a big help if anybody could find a solution to help and resolve the speed-related issues I am experiencing with my notebook?

 

[Omnis]

How hot is your laptop getting? Laptops have a tendency to throttle performance when they reach a temperature threshold.

 

[Ameer67]

Check your computer's activity in the task manager when the slow downs happen to see if it is reaching its limits.

 

[Marcus96]

Temperatures seem okay. I checked the processes and there is still an issue, even with a CPU usage of around only 5%.

Also aren't those tasks (YouTube/Emulators/Fraps) dependent on GPU and not CPU?

 

[Ameer67]

Also aren't those tasks (YouTube/Emulators/Fraps) dependent on GPU and not CPU?

Mostly GPU dependent, yes. CPU still has some play in it though. (Bottlenecks when gaming for example.)

How about the HDD activity light? My computer was slow and I noticed the light was nearly on the whole time. Swapped the hard drive, then bam, no more slowdowns.

 

[Marcus96]

HDD Activity Light is just doing it's normal flickering with all tasks.

CPU Usage is at 100% with YouTube at 1080p. Flash Player is using all of the CPU. I would also like to experience YouTube's 60fps option, however there is no option in Firefox. What can I do?

 

[Ameer67]

HDD Activity Light is just doing it's normal flickering with all tasks.

CPU Usage is at 100% with YouTube at 1080p. Flash Player is using all of the CPU. I would also like to experience YouTube's 60fps option, however there is no option in Firefox. What can I do?

I think 60 FPS is only in Chrome.

 

[Marcus96]

Oh right. I guess main priority is the CPU usage. I don't know what could possibly be causing it. I am really baffled about this???

 

[sesselpupser]

Jerkiness in YouTube could also be because of your network speed, but I can imagine a 2.2GHz dual core processor might struggle to keep up. I assume you've tried pausing it to let it buffer, so it probably is just that your processor isn't up to it. Have you checked your RAM usage though? 4GB isn't a whole lot. I have no idea what the deal is with YouTube, Flash and HTML5 but if it's still using Flash then that's also going to slow you down because Flash is an absolute dinosaur, a real resource hog and it needs to die ASAP for the good of mankind.

As for trying to record emulated games with FRAPS... I tried to do that once with a processor that had two cores more and clocked 50% faster than yours, twice as much RAM (that was also clocked 50% faster than yours, I think) and a desktop GPU with three times the VRAM you had and it would struggle to keep a smooth frame rate at 1680x1050. Emulators are very hard on the CPU relative to what they're doing anyway so while the laptop may run the emulator fine it's consuming more resources than you might think for a simple SNES or PSX game. Add FRAPS The Almighty Killer of Frame Rates and it's going to take an even bigger hit. There's not a lot you can do about this, though, since you don't have a Kepler GPU for Shadowplay nor an AMD APU for whatever they call their Shadowplay equivalent. Try dropping the recording quality, resolution and frame rate to ease the load on your processors but traditionally you need some pretty decent hardware to record with FRAPS at high quality settings. Shadowplay and AMD's equivalent offload all that to an entirely separate processor so there's practically no noticeable drop in frame rate while you play, though, so they're awesome. Not that that helps you much.

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

As much as I love Firefox (because of all the awesome add ons I have), it's ability to play videos is terrible. If I intend to watch some online videos, I'll use Google Chrome instead.

Put it this way, like someone above, I have twice as many cores as your PC at nearly double the clock speed, with a GPU throwing out over 5 Teraflops, and I get all sorts of crazy, varying frame rates, microstutter or screen tearing when watching 1080p Youtube videos in Firefox. Google Chrome on the other hand plays 4k, 60fps videos effortlessly.

As mentioned, FRAPS can kill your frame rate, try MSI Afterburner's recording feature and see how that works for you. You can also use MSI Afterburner to display your frame rate, CPU and GPU temperatures, RAM used and whatever else you want while playing your games.

 

[Grayfox]

Lewis, if you are having issues with Youtube, try setting the player type to HTML 5 instead of flash.

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

Lewis, if you are having issues with Youtube, try setting the player type to HTML 5 instead of flash.

I tried that and fiddling with enabling media features in advanced settings, but didn't enjoy being restricted to 360p and 720p only and still no 60fps support. Just easier to use Chrome instead.