Upgrade or replace?

[Ho72]

If I reboot then open Lightroom, it goes ok. Otherwise, the photo applications just seem to run more slowly that it sounds like others are getting.

In the Task Manager Performance tab, check your cpu utilization and memory usage (in use/available) when you see the symptoms you describe (hangs, flashing screens, etc). I agree with others that something is amiss.

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Sometimes I look at posts from people I've placed on my IGNORE list. When I do, I'm quickly reminded of why I chose to ignore them in the first place.

 

[TomV1]

If I reboot then open Lightroom, it goes ok. Otherwise, the photo applications just seem to run more slowly that it sounds like others are getting.

In the Task Manager Performance tab, check your cpu utilization and memory usage (in use/available) when you see the symptoms you describe (hangs, flashing screens, etc). I agree with others that something is amiss.

I agree wholeheartedly. I always see suggestions for increasing memory to solve problems. I always recommend that the user monitor the mem usage to determine how much is really being used before doing such an upgrade.

 

[CBR1100XX]

I'm going to agree with the 32GB of RAM and RTX card suggestions. An RTX 3060 Ti isn't too bad at 400 dollars for a founders edition but what PSU are you currently running? Your current system doesn't use much power so I just want to double check that.

If power is an issue I'd still go with the RAM and then upgrade to a 3060 and probably go used. Right now new prices make no sense as they're only like 20-40 dollars lower than the Ti model. But the used market has gone down a lot with 3060's around 250-275. So with the RAM you're at 350-375 for the total upgrade and you'd have a pretty nice PC to use, gift, or sell, when it comes time to upgrade everything in a few years.

 

[BackToNature1]

If I reboot then open Lightroom, it goes ok. Otherwise, the photo applications just seem to run more slowly that it sounds like others are getting.

In the Task Manager Performance tab, check your cpu utilization and memory usage (in use/available) when you see the symptoms you describe (hangs, flashing screens, etc). I agree with others that something is amiss.

I agree wholeheartedly. I always see suggestions for increasing memory to solve problems. I always recommend that the user monitor the mem usage to determine how much is really being used before doing such an upgrade.

It's always a good idea to update a computer's Memory if that's within one's budget. I have done it to PCs or laptops and have never regretted doing so. Regardless of what programs one is running. Heck, the browsers alone can Hog the Memory, continually.

 

[Ho72]

BackToNature1 wrote:
It's always a good idea to update a computer's Memory if that's within one's budget. I have done it to PCs or laptops and have never regretted doing so. Regardless of what programs one is running. Heck, the browsers alone can Hog the Memory, continually.

I don't disagree that the OP's machine is light on RAM and more RAM may be the cure. But there may be another piece of software with issues (e.g. a memory leak) that is consuming available RAM. Adding more memory to such an environment will just give the offending app more memory to consume, possibly resulting in the same degraded state of affairs. Best to fix that problem first, if it exists, before moving on to hardware upgrades.

--
Sometimes I look at posts from people I've placed on my IGNORE list. When I do, I'm quickly reminded of why I chose to ignore them in the first place.

 

[Craig Gillette]

Not that i can tell by looking but just opened and closed LR several times with task manager open and watching performance monitor and resource monitor?

It's running at about 35% memory used with just Firefox (and all those other things that show up on the Resource Monitor as open, etc.). It goes to 60% or so as Lightroom opens. A couple of times it opened smoothly, a time or two it showed "Not responding" on the performance/resource monitors, once or twice on the top bar of the program on the screen display as it opened. It went through to being open full screen most of the times, once it was a smaller screen and needed to be expanded. I didn't notice anything different on the Task Manager monitor displays - like nothing pegging to the top, etc. as it went along.

Never moved off .78 GHz for speed?

The SSD is about half full and the other drives have plenty of available space, too, nothing over 50% used.

 

[CBR1100XX]

Not that i can tell by looking but just opened and closed LR several times with task manager open and watching performance monitor and resource monitor?

It's running at about 35% memory used with just Firefox (and all those other things that show up on the Resource Monitor as open, etc.). It goes to 60% or so as Lightroom opens. A couple of times it opened smoothly, a time or two it showed "Not responding" on the performance/resource monitors, once or twice on the top bar of the program on the screen display as it opened. It went through to being open full screen most of the times, once it was a smaller screen and needed to be expanded. I didn't notice anything different on the Task Manager monitor displays - like nothing pegging to the top, etc. as it went along.

Never moved off .78 GHz for speed?

The SSD is about half full and the other drives have plenty of available space, too, nothing over 50% used.

The things that concern me is that it changes drastically as the computer is running but is fine at startup. Usually it's the opposite of that.

That means they your performance is fine but something starts running in the background to slow things down.

I'd go through your startup list on task manager and see if anything looks out of the ordinary and then Google it. Also check active processes once your computer gets to the point of being sluggish and see what's taking away performance.

I mean it could be something as simple as Windows update trying to do a bunch of background tasks and having a glitch.

 

[Craig Gillette]

Did a restart and it was about 24-28% memory in use then up to 37-40% now with firefox opened. However, with "nothing" except the monitors under task manager open, I was getting a lot of "hard faults" reported. Now with firefox open, too, that's dropped to mostly zero with a few hits now and then.

 

[CBR1100XX]

Did a restart and it was about 24-28% memory in use then up to 37-40% now with firefox opened. However, with "nothing" except the monitors under task manager open, I was getting a lot of "hard faults" reported. Now with firefox open, too, that's dropped to mostly zero with a few hits now and then.

What about CPU or disk usage per app when you're before/after you experience this lag? There's a bottleneck popping up somewhere as your computer runs.

 

[Craig Gillette]

I checked later after running the computer for several hours. In that time it was mostly browsing, Firefox and some Google, a little Word and Excel. I closed everything them. but didn't restart. Opened task manager and resource monitor. Opened LR and it got a small partial window, then the white panel in the middle. It froze for while showing red in the monitor too. Memory usage climbed slowly, no spikes. "Hard errors" showed spiking then dropped to zero again. LR went back to running but in the small window, all of this concurrent. I clicked the small window because it reported open running but couldn't see it fully. Clicking brought it to full screen but that overlapped the monitors, clicked them forward, no obvious spikes anywhere or up down on memory use. Went to just over 50% Memory with Firefox opened again. Tried a few picture choices, did a few edits and nothing showed obvious changes besides disk activity. FWIW I've deleted and reinstalled LR in the past and updates with Creative Cloud when provided.Using Nvidia Creative (?) - not gaming drivers.

 

[Ho72]

I'm not clear what level of balkiness you observed with your latest experiment but if you continue to have the troublesome symptoms you first described, it might be worth trying a clean boot. The first link is to a Dell walk-through (not specific to their machines) and the second from MS includes steps on how to troubleshoot if a clean boot clears things up. Caveat: I don't know how Adobe apps might be affected by this procedure but the last link to Adobe makes it appear it should be ok.

Dell

Microsoft

Adobe

--
Sometimes I look at posts from people I've placed on my IGNORE list. When I do, I'm quickly reminded of why I chose to ignore them in the first place.

 

[Craig Gillette]

Lightroom installs more quickly and cleanly if I reboot the system. It's a delay that perhaps shouldn't be needed but I do it because not doing it is slower.

Re-installing Windows might solve some problems, or a "new" system, installing only programs I'm actively using is likely a good idea.

As to the general slowness, that's kind of an impression, short of having a couple of closely matched systems, there are a range of different things that might be an issue RAM speed, disk/SSD speeds, file sizes that could make it hard to tell. Something funky happening.

But I read about a person doing something and having X number of files to sort through, triage, then convert, etc. Some will say, I have an A, B, and C in my system and it works fine, really fast, others apparently far faster processors, much more memory, etc. "Only need XXX' or "that's just a bare minimum, one really needs YYY," etc.

 

[dmartin92]

I suppose that there is some workaround for installing Windows 11 on machines that don’t have a CPU that is on the list of CPUs that are eligible for Windows 11, but Windows 10 is going away, two years from now ?



Is the CPU on this machine valid for Windows 11 ? I was surprised to see that two machines I have, that are not really that old, aren’t officially valid for Windows 11.

 

[Craig Gillette]

CPU and RAM is sufficient. I ran Windows Health Check and apparently I need to resolve Secure Boot and TPM 2.

I've got 11 on my laptop but this one is set up with the classic shell interface which I'm used to. I haven't found any particular need to go to 11 so hadn't looked into it.

 

[jfriend00]

I suppose that there is some workaround for installing Windows 11 on machines that don’t have a CPU that is on the list of CPUs that are eligible for Windows 11, but Windows 10 is going away, two years from now ?

Is the CPU on this machine valid for Windows 11 ? I was surprised to see that two machines I have, that are not really that old, aren’t officially valid for Windows 11.

My i7-9700k is running Win 11 just fine. The processor is not the issue. If there's an issue, it would be with the motherboard.

 

[Austinian]

I suppose that there is some workaround for installing Windows 11 on machines that don’t have a CPU that is on the list of CPUs that are eligible for Windows 11, but Windows 10 is going away, two years from now ?

Maybe, maybe not. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Is the CPU on this machine valid for Windows 11 ? I was surprised to see that two machines I have, that are not really that old, aren’t officially valid for Windows 11.

AFAIK, the oldest 11-supported CPUs are the i7-78xx HEDT chips, otherwise the 8th gen standard chips.

 

[BobKnDP]

List of Windows 11 officially supported Intel CPUs.

I see that it has been updated with the Gen 13 CPUs, which were just released on 20 October 2022.