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Hi,

I have had this intermittent issue with a specific user now for ages, I didn’t hear anything about it for a while, but it’s come back to bite me again and I don’t know how to proceed with it as I’ve tried just about everything I can think of.

Issue:
Basically, this user has slowness issues with his laptop, as in all software runs slow. It’s intermittent and it only seems to occur while he’s working at 1 of the 2 offices he attends. Also in the mornings his teams meetings drop, I looked at event viewer and saw the dock had critical errors, causing ethernet to drop and reconnect to wireless. Swapped out his dock and same issue
-Teams Calls Drop
-Static through headset
-Overall slowness e.g. navigating in OS
-Performing action on webpage and nothing happening for 5 minutes
-Memory up at 95% (Chrome chewing up 10GB of that and Teams following behind)

Other people work from the same office on the same connection and don’t have this issue

Things I’ve tried:
-Reinstall OS
-Got him brand new computer with good specs as he does use quite heavily
( Latitude 7330 12th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-1265U, 32GB 3200 MHz DDR4, 512GB PCIe NVME)
-New headset
-Changed ethernet lead
-Changed docking station
-Logged MS ticket (they didn’t help at all as usual)
-Tried ethernet & wireless
-Speedtest 40mbps~ up/down
-Driver reinstall

We used to have a hybrid environment however now we just use Intune & Entra ID, the only thing I can think of if some policy is doing this or some weird network issue.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks heaps

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What differentiates this user from others? Different software? Different work files? Does he have a massive Excel spreadsheet open in Chrome eating all the memory? Similarly, does he always have the same set of files open when the lag occurs?

When it’s a single user, there’s usually something simple but obscure, so it bypasses initial troubleshooting. If it’s location specific, is it related to file shares or services the device is trying to access and has a really long retry/timeout period? Do the user’s AD/AAD account attributes look in line with expected defaults?

If the user reboots and puts the laptop in flight mode, can they re-create the lag if they work ‘offline’ for the day? (i.e. Take meetings on their phone) If it’s a policy/config issue, I’d expect it to manifest without the laptop needing to phone home.

If it can’t be re-produced offline, then the next step would be to crack out Wireshark and SysInternals to see what’s occurring.

Lastly, I’ve anecdotally come across Windows systems from XP up to 10 crap out due to system memory and the ‘fix’ was to set a large, fixed size range for virtual memory, rather than let it be system managed. Probably happens on Win 11 too but we’re only just rolling it out to our estate, so can;t say with certainty. This was more an issue with under spec’d PCs with HDDs, than newly provisioned current gen laptops with SSDs. But, I thought it’s worth a mention, given you’ve exhausted most troubleshooting steps I would’ve taken and we’re at the ‘clutching at straws’ stage.

Hope this helps.

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Been having similar with one user where i am, Win10 doing same thing. Drops teams after 10mins, memory max , etc. Gave them a brand new laptop and issue remained, firmware upgraded on HP dock and issue resolved. Just checked this morning and everything running as should be.

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Backup running?
A/V Scan?

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I already tried the dock :frowning:

I gave the user a different branded dock but I think he swapped with one around the office which is same brand so I’ll follow this up.

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Thank you definitely some things I’ll try in here.

The user has an absolute bucketload of PO’s tabs open as he’s head of procurement, also because he’s head of procurement there’s like a few hours a week maybe I have to troubleshoot the issue.

We used to have on prem file shares & AD but we don’t anymore, just cloud based, one of my thoughts was there was something mapped and timing out but I’m not sure how this would work with the old hybrid setup.

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I don’t think so but I will have a look at the logs to double check

thanks for your response

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You should have started off with this ?? As this can be something that is the root of the issues (not how applications work but how the user expects his machine to work).
Did you check his resource manager for the following ?

  • RAM (free, used, cached)
  • IOPs used & IOPS available (average)
    The 5 sets of numbers can sometimes show where the issues really is…

I usually ignore the numbers on “networking” as the machine could have Gbps NICs and LAN resource numbers can go into 1000s gbps but your wifi could be much lower than that especially if the APs or Internet connections are shared with a few users.

Are they open in the browser or Acrobat (reader or Pro) ?

For browser especially chrome, there is a setting not to update or run process in background. So my users can run 10 or even 300 on-screen reports or pin 100s ot tabs (when the open chrome 100s tabs open)…but nothing runs except for the screen they are on.
https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/161635830/multiple-chrome-processes?hl=en

For Acrobat (reader or pro), I untick the online storage options (show online storage when opening/saving files) and I also disabled the Security (Enhanced) option to enable protected mode and untick “enable enhanced security”

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