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HI There

I am an IT Technician at an accounting firm, We have a user who runs, i5 Quad core 5th gen processor, 128Gb SSD, 8Gb Ram, we have other users who have the same equipment and the slowness effects just this one user, Does anyone have any tips on how to make her machine speed up I am pretty sure she has a stupid size outlook inbox, And she runs IE Digita and Sage normally all at the same time, would this affect the speed and responsivness of programs?

Thanks

Phillip

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I think you posted this in the wrong group

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What have you done to assess the situation? If you think it’s her Outlook .ost file, how big is it?

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Is the slowness her perception, or genuinely witnessed & measured?

Monitor RAM, CPU, disk, and page file usage. Get her to note times when the system is being particularly slow. Watch Task Manager for runaway processes - Chrome is a particularly common offender when it comes to swallowing RAM or CPU.

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I would check for a USB flash drive or some device attached that might be slowing the PC down. Maybe run a check on the hard drive, reseat the RAM. And if all else fails, backup her data and reload the OS.

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The specs are more than enough to handle what she does on a daily basis, so there’s gotta be something else at play. Like JoeWilliams said, i would monitor the resource usage (using resmon.exe) and see when (or if) one of them maxes out.

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How much extra crap has she loaded on her system?

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Yup. Also, do they have admin rights to install random crap?

Google Desktop and other pointless things it does not require for her to do her job.

What troubleshooting have you done and googling ?

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What exactly is slow? We need details, the more, the merrier.

Is she working at home? VPN slow? 100/10 network? Gigabyte network? Verify her network speed? Size of OST file? Size of PST file? What antivirus? Check for bloatware? Check for malware? Check for unused programs? Everything and anything you can think of, list them.

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She works in the office all the time, she had an old machine that was really slow, so gave her a new machine, specs above, everyone else who has that spec is fine just her computer, she doesn’t have admin rights none of the users do. so no chance of unwanted apps and programs getting on the machine. We have gave her a new outlook profile. also roaming profiles has been turned off so that doesn’t have any chance of slowing the machine down the only thing I have left to do is rebuild her profile, but want to avoid this if possible.

The computer has no viruses on it virus scans get run on our system once a day on all computers.

She literally only has what she needs on there, her outlook profile hovers around 1.7Gb but every user has a 2Gb limit. except for a few like the partners and directors.

This user moans about everything being slow i will get her to note down times and see if I can spot a pattern as to when this slows down.

Thanks

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Double check the PC, because this is very, very untrue. There are many programs, including all the various versions of cryptolocker, that can install without admin rights. Programs like Google Chrome and FireFox are common examples.

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I have thats how I know there is no unwated programs on there. we put chrome on the computers as our users prefer it to IE. I think i would know if she had cryptolocker on there as well as our anti virus would have picked it up by now. and also she can still access all of her files.

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And Spotify, etc.

Compare her installed programs to someone else that is fine.

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Oh, I agree about the AV scans catching viruses. I had meant to check for other programs that you might not be aware of, as there are many that a User can install without admin rights.

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oh okay. I get you now

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HI Joe, The slowness has been witnessed but 90 percent of the time when she says its slow when we go to look at the machine it isn’t slow and it works fine. I don’t know weather she thinks that it should just happen straight away when she launches a program or sends an email.

Her outlook is the thing that is normally slow however we have users who use there email more than she does and they don’t have an issue, would it be a good idea building her a new profile just in case something is corrupt on her old one?

Phillip

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While that can’t hurt, I would try launching Outlook in safe mode to see if maybe there’s an add-on messing with it.

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You said it’s normally Outlook that is slow, what exactly is slow in Outlook? Sending a message? Opening new email? Everything- menu’s and all?

Side note- We have some users like this at a couple of the clients we work with, I think some people are just impatient/like to complain. If facebook takes a few seconds to load one time or they have wait for a few seconds for a 20MB email to download they will whine about the ‘whole computer is slow’.

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you need to define what is slow. outlook, accounting programs, email lookups, file opening, what

this is a typical user who just says “its slow”

this doesn’t help you, and doesn’t help us trying to help you. continue to drill down on what the actual issue is, and work from there

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Things that are slow in outlook, writing emails so she will type something then a couple seconds later the words get typed out by the computer, I have seen this but only once in the time she has had this slowness issue, I think that is the main reason, So does have a heavy load on her mailbox but wont archive this to take it down to a sensible size.

But as I said before we have users who have the same size mailbox and users that receive more emails daily then she does and there computer are fine.

Phillip