As soon as Win7 support is sunsetted, our transition to Mac begins. Win10 isn't happening in my house. I have one laptop I use in the field with it, and I HATE it (plus all the spying telemetry all over the place you can't get rid of). The transition will suck, but long term is the only answer.

Also all decent PC antivirus is transitioning to the cloud, meaning your files will be sent to the cloud and many have rootkit VPN now or will have them soon, which is another do-not-want. So even if Windows was great, that antivirus change would push us to Macs sooner rather than later.

My decision came while shopping at Best Buy over 10 years ago. I had a beat Gateway or something like that and needed something new. Macs were a little more, but the Mini seemed reasonable and perfect for my needs.

But what really sealed the deal was all those standing in line for the geek squad with their PCs in hand. lol. And the ever confusing selection of pricy antivirus.

I'm typing on that same Mac Mini right now, original keyboard and all. And if the monitor ever goes, it's just a cheapo Samsung.

The PC at work is fairly reliable though, so I get to experience the wonders of both.

My daughter started with a Dell laptop with vista and now she's Mac and never looking back.

I know there are some things you can do on a PC that you can't do on a Mac and vice versa, but I don't need any of it. Just something that is reliable, easy to use, and never cost me another dime since I bought it.

I hope you get yours figured out and wish I could really help.

Bring up task manager
Click app history tab. Identify programs with high CPU utilization times.
Click Startup tab - disable everything on that list.
Reboot

Does it still happen? If yes reenable all you disabled and reboot.
If no, enable one by one (rebooting after every enable) until you find the culprit.

I despise most anti virus programs. I would also try disabling that temporarily. Kill all Trend Micro services by clicking start - typing services.msc - right click all trend micro items and select disable. Reboot.

Just throwing this out there:

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3081050/windows-10-cortana-cpu-hog-issue

Linux is fantastic, I made the switch a couple months ago. Actually even if you do need games, I would still recommend Linux. There are ways to get your games running that are much easier than in past years. The only major hurdle that remains is games that use Easy Anti-Cheat, and I believe there is work to also port this to Linux.

Windows is far from irrelevant in the private sector (my career is supporting it every day), but in a home setting it's getting more and more difficult to recommend Windows to the average person. Install a distribution like Ubuntu or Mint and the average web surfer/email user/document editor never needs to touch the command line.

Change out the SSD.

Some of them just work like crap.

You can Chase software issues if you like, but most computers seem ok with crappy software filled with viruses and malware and still run strong.

On a windows based PC, if it freezes, the hard disk stopped running pure and simple.

Probably not RAM (although I have seen bad RAM freeze a computer), almost always a balky hard dish or SSD, or cable or terrible power.

If you have more than one RAM module, run them one at a time an see if the computer freezes.

Since everything on a windows PC runs through the hard disk via the swap file, freezing usually means the hard disk is balky.

Its hesitating to follow an instruction.

Many things can cause this, but my money is on a balky drive.

No, clone the drive as it is.
It will be just fine and start up normally.

Use clonezilla or any good copy program.

I use paragon.

You can start over if you want.

But I would clone it first and see if it fixes it. Then you will know more.

If the clone fails, then make a new clean drive on the new ssd.

See if that fixes it.

Make a clone. Remove the old drive, boot it up.

To properly troubleshoot the problem, do as Pinballinreno states. Clone it and see if the problem persists.

One step at a time will save you money and time in the end.

If you take too many steps at once, you will never know what caused the problem and may never solve it. Then you will not know if the ssd you have is usable or not. And you could spend countless hours troubleshooting and buying parts.

Otherwise, it is easier to just buy a new machine.

I have a windows issue that plagued me for a long time and finally just gave up on fixing it. It still comes and goes for no reason, but it does not stop me from using my computer. So I have learned to live with it. I know someday, the computer will be replaced.

Good luck! Patience is a must with MS windows.

Installing the OS from scratch wipes the drive clean, it formats it before writing to it.

You can erase the drive in the windows installer via the utility that helps you select the drive if you want.

Yes, absolutely.
It's what I would do.

If after that the problem persists, replace the RAM.

After that, its probably mainboard or bios or power related.

Did you try uninstalling trend micro and rebooting mentioned a while back? AV definition chances can do weird things, too. You can re-install if it didn't fix it.

I hope that takes care of it.

Have you looked at the manufacturers website to see if there's a new firmware available?
As far as cloning goes, if you have a regular hard drive laying around that is equal size or larger then clone it to that and see if it still happens.
No real point of blowing money on another SSD to find out it was always software related.

He has the current drive firmware.

Restore points are weak at best.
Don't depend on them.

I've had like a 50/50 success rate with them.

Windows is old, hobbled and bloated.

I'm telling people to get chromebooks and chromeboxes now.

Way fewer problems.
Way faster.
Way more reliable.
Way cheaper than apple.
Same idea behind it.

No, no, no. Chrome is Google. Chromebook is Chrome. Google is bad. They've gone full-on evil in the last couple years in the search for ever more profits. Less Google in your life is better, not more. Google's drive for money has accelerated its job of knowing everything about you. Tracking everything you do (even when of questionable methods) online, reading all your gmail, listening to everything you say (if you have nest hub or newer nest thermostats, or god forbid google home), and if you have android, tracking who you call and where you go. And this despite what you may have told it not to do. There are loopholes on everything they do, privacy-wise.

If you're not into Win 10, your options are Mac first, then Linux distant second. Mac will be the most compatible and have the least amount of weird issues.

Yes to all of that but:

Privacy is non existant today for most people, but I have nothing to hide.

Each time I boot up my windows laptop I have to wait 20 mins for it to update before I can use it.

Forced updates take my wifi printer offline and my other wireless devices periodically.

My chromebook is always ready and is ready to use in 10 seconds or less.

I find it more reliable in spite of the evil engine that runs it.

When pressed for time I never boot up my windows laptop. It can take 40 mins just to get online if it has set for a couple weeks.

I have at least 40 windows computers. I use them a lot, but at home I'm using my chromebook more and more.

It's just less work.

It's not an issue of what you have to hide, it's an issue of do you want to be manipulated in ways you can't even understand. They don't hire scores of psychologists at Google to make your mental health better, they hire them to learn how to exploit people more effectively in their everyday lives.

Open a Macbook from hibernate and it's ready to go in seconds and you don't have a fraction of the privacy problems you do with a Chromebook. I understand the choice you made, but I would never, EVER recommend Chrome anything now that Google has taken a hard turn into evil territory.

Yep, I agree with all of that 100%

You are not wrong in your assesments.

Alexa recordings? Really bad.

But people buy what they can afford.

$179 for a new laptop?
People buy a lot of them.

I have changed out a lot more broken screens on chromebooks than windows laptops in the last couple years.

So, the people have spoken. At least in my area.

Apple is almost as bad as Google. I bought a factory refurbished Dell Latitude laptop and run Linux Mint on it. If you're concerned about privacy... only use free and open source software, use a privacy centric browser like Brave, don't visit Google hosted sites, use OpenVPN, and blacklist the camera/microphone kernel modules.

Yep.

I agree. Chromebooks are the way to go for browsing the internet. Instant boot up. I have a touchscreen Acer and I love it.

I use Windows 10 and MacOS both on a regular basis and both are good. I’m an IT guy and if one of my computers starts flaking out I just take an hour and reload it from scratch and I’m good for another year of smooth operation.

Absolutely.

However in 3 years my chromebook has stayed the same and needed nothing.

It just runs.

It's not perfect and won't do some things, but it's always there when I need it.

In 10 seconds.

Chromebooks are built on Linux.

Yup.

No interest in Chromebooks. Google's meddling in politics and their privacy issues are a big turn off. Plus I want a popular OS where I can run popular programs......

Apple isn't even in the same UNIVERSE as Google for privacy abuses because their sole business is not marketing you as a product to advertisers. It's the reason Google and Facebook are taking such a hard turn into full-on evil. Money. The fines are tiny compared to the money they make, so they break the rules and pay the fines and their stock goes up anyway.

Brave is Chromium. Chrome is bad, as are all offshoots. Open source or not. Google is trying to do bad things with the Internet and privacy and Chrome/Chromium are part of the plan.

Agreed.

Did you resolve this problem?

Did windows update download an update during that time? Given the problems other users were reporting similar to yours, they might have just pushed out a fix. You can look at the windows update history to see...

Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that going around. Microsoft claims it only happens under specific circumstances, but I've read a number of articles on "slowdowns/sluggishness" after installing recent Windows Updates. I guess with millions of (if not a billion+) installs, you're going to have problems every now and then.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-work-around-windows-10s-latest-update-issues-1838107037/amp

Just venting but hopefully helps someone in the future - do NOT use Carbonite!

What they don’t tell you is it takes over an hour per gb for restore services. That’s right. 60 gb. Take ya over 60 hours !!!! 80gb- over 80 hours restoring your system.

Sure I should have performed a scheduled outage for equipment replacement but when something crashes - I expected a quick turnaround from Carbonite. There is nothing quick about these people!

Best bet is just set up a redundant system and have it back up often. Forget this company!

That much data takes a lot of time to transfer. It would be the same with any similar cloud service.

It's probably a bit unfair to blame the service you used since the bottleneck was likely your Internet service speed.

But about 1GB per hour is actually a pretty good transfer speed.

Understand your point but the bottleneck isn’t my service. It’s noted that it’s actually Carbonite - stating it’s their security / encryption that throttles it down.

I guess my venting is - and from what I’ve read of others similar situations - no where did they explain or even try to hint it could take days if not a week to restore

Then when I actually started the restore process - it’s shows one set of information - that changes constantly while restoring.

I feel Carbonite is the “bus driver” telling me (and me telling customers same info) this will take us so long on this journey because we have this many miles to go (based on my data they have stored) after 30 hours of traveling on a 20 hr planned trip- the bus driver says - oh we still have 20 more hrs to go!

The amount of data showing to be restored constantly has gone up, down, back up. It’s like a moving target. Ugh. They don’t really know - so I don’t really know. That’s the frustrating part. Just warning others.

Again - venting. I knew my system was failing and had even purchased a new desk top. Just was not ready for a full crash - then to find out it takes days to restore - after the crash, not pleasant. (I’d rather work on a pinball machine force flow ! ).