Does your PC slow down when downloading?

dominikhh71

Commendable
Jun 6, 2018
11
0
1,510
So I thought I would share this to make everything easier. I have a laptop with windows 10 installed. Whenever I downloaded any games, the laptop would become barely usable. Tried everything people said, nothing worked. Then I tried turning off Windows Defender. And it instatly changed everything. Download speeds went up, and the PC was useable again. The annoying part is, even if I was downloading from MS store, Defender would slow down my PC. I hope this helps you to have a functioning system. After the download finished, I enabled Defender, and the performance stayed the same.
 
Solution
This is pretty typical. Windows 10 security stuff will thrash a spinning disk to within an inch of its life, especially if the spinning disk is also the system (C) drive.

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
Disabling Windows Defender is risky at any time and especially so if doing downloads.

May not necessarily be Windows Defender. Could be some other reason or even a combination of reasons or circumstances - hardware and software.

What are your laptop's specs?

Suggestion:

Use Task Manager and Resource Monitor to observe your laptop's activities and performance when not downloading.

Then leave the window open and slide to one side so you can continue watching.

Download as usual. Look for some application or resource that is claiming a far greater % of resources.

 

dominikhh71

Commendable
Jun 6, 2018
11
0
1,510
I checked task manager, and that's how I found Windows Defender was taking all my resources. My specs are: i5-7300HQ, GTX 1050Ti, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 1TBHDD. My hard drive is the bottleneck here, but when I disbaled Defender, the disk usage went from 100% to 60-70%, with much higher download speeds. I was downloading Forza Horizon 4, from MS store, wich I find safe.