Shower Muse

I saw this photo on Unsplash this morning. I’m a fan of birds and recognize that their seasonal migration is happening now. We have a clear glass feeder on our front porch and sometimes hear the hum of their wings as they dart in for a drink of nectar. We make our own because of something we read about the red dye in the store-bought mixes being bad for them. What amazing creatures!

Spoiler: I think I fixed the problem. But here are some suggestions on what to check.

I came back from a work trip to find my Windows 10 PC acting funny. My normally fast machine started periodically pausing on most requests. Eventually about every 30 seconds any outstanding requests would pause for 5-10 seconds. That may not sound like much but it was maddeningly unproductive. Oddly some things like the Pandora app worked without issue. My custom PC is years old but has lasted because I “overspecced” it in the beginning. That’s my recommendation for those buying new computer equipment – to get more than you need so you get more and better life out of it. But since this machine was getting up there, I figured I’d do some quick troubleshooting but begin getting prices for a possible new build.

Weird slowdown problems like this are difficult to troubleshoot in a computer. There are so many possible causes. I’ve been through it before, more than once, and I believe it ended up being something different every time. I’m writing this for my own personal info but also in case someone happens here with similar problems.

Troubleshooting steps

Hard drive test/replacement. SMART indicated no issues and Windows resource graphs (in task manager) showed no odd spikes. I did get a message in the notification center that I should check the disk for errors but with four drives, it would have been more helpful if it specified which one. But this made me suspect the culprit was a bad drive. Even though all were probably no older than a year or so, drives, even SSD drives, do go bad. I ran error checking and found none. But still suspecting a hard drive issue, I went out to Staples and bought a new HP 500GB SSD for $55, which seemed like a good deal. The worst-case scenario was that I’d have a backup of my C drive, which I wanted anyway. Last year I bought a USB adapter that works with SATA connections and I’ve used it so many times. It’s great to have for cloning drives like this. Although I’ve had good luck with the Samsung Data Migration Tool, it only works with Samsung drives. One of the other SSD drives I purchased came with Acronis True Image 2015, admittedly an old, old version by 2019 but it completed the task without problem. Side note: I’ve had several good experiences with Acronis True Image and will probably purchase a new license for the newest version. It’s an important and worthwhile utility. Sadly, the new hard drive made no difference whatsoever but at least I have a backup SSD.

Drivers. I spent a lot of time on Google looking for suggestions and one was to check the hard drive, USB controller, and video drivers. I checked USB because two of my drives are USB 3.0. I found none to be out of date, though.

Memory. I’ve had memory go bad over the years. Not often but once or twice and it’s one of those things that doesn’t always seem obvious. I’ve never seen an error from Windows that said: “memory bad – replace RAM now.” Thankfully checking memory is easy with the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, which reboots your computer into command-line mode. Sadly when done it does a poor job of telling you the results, dumping them into a log file instead of just telling you on the screen, but it’s nice that the tool exists. No bad memory was detected this time.

CPU/motherboard temperature monitoring. Using CPU-Z and HWMonitor from CPUID, freeware I’ve used for years, are great tools for giving you in the scoop on what hardware your PC is running, clock speed, and temperatures. This was helpful for documenting my current system specs for comparison against what I would buy to replace it, but also to make sure I didn’t have any temperature spikes that would have caused the CPU to stall. HWMonitor registers a Max over a period of time so I didn’t have to sit and watch it. By the way, one of the first things I tried was taking my PC case outside and blowing the dust out with an air compressor. Judging from the dust that came out, I probably should do that more often. But I noticed no spikes out of the acceptable ranges.

OS test. At this point, I was beginning to suspect something was going on with Windows and I needed a way to rule that out. I’ve dabbled with Linux over the years and enjoy it very much but never made the switch for long because I always end up needing tools that aren’t easily used outside of Windows/Mac, such as the Adobe suite. An easy way to try visual Linux is to burn a DVD with (or save to a USB drive) Ubuntu or similar and boot from that. It won’t load as quickly but you can play around with the OS. I did this and left it running for several hours, loading lots of tabs in multiple browser windows, and filling RAM up with running apps. I mounted multiple hard drives and loaded files from them but didn’t experience any of the same slowdowns I suffered from Windows 10.

Start over? This is about where I started thinking seriously about replacing the whole system. I created a spreadsheet to compare prices for two very nice systems, Intel vs. AMD. I didn’t want to spend the money (I never do) but was looking forward to the bump in features, such as onboard USB 3.2 type C, higher maximum RAM (64/128GB Intel/AMD), and M.2 NVME SSD capabilities. The AMD variat, which was suprisingly more expensive than Intel, also offered Bluetooth 5 and PCI 4, which theoretically allows for a huge boost in throughput performance, almost 10 times faster than my current SSD drives. CPU and memory performance would be higher, of course. I looked at an Intel i7-9700K Coffee Lake processor and also the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, both running at 3.6 Ghz with 8 cores and 16 threads. But with prices ranging from $1200-$1400 for a custom build, I decided to try a little harder to fix my current PC’s problems.

There are 1,000 things that could be causing the slowdown and I didn’t have time to try and track them all down so I decided I’d take one of my 500 GB SSD drives and reinstall Windows. I also had a spare 256 GB SSD drive that I planned to use for a backup Ubuntu OS. In a pinch, much of what I do could be done in Ubuntu and it would be fun to have it to play around with and learn more about Linux, even with the graphical UI. I began documenting all of the apps I would need to reinstall (over 40 I use regularly, not including suites) and copying any files I wanted to keep from the C drive, such as the huge Documents folder.

This is where I may have lucked into the solution, though I’m still not sure of the cause. While clicking through the Windows 10 C drive I discovered the pagefile.sys, the file Windows uses in conjunction with RAM for memory operations, was over 50GB. I guess that’s not so unusual when you have 16GB of physical RAM (1.5 x physical RAM is the guideline) but it appeared to be resized frequently. It seems to me it would take quite a while to keep building a 50GB file. I did some research and found that lots of people changed pagefile management to manual and reduced the size. I reduced mine to 1.5 GB minimum and 4 GB maximum and set the location to the OS drive only. After rebooting I didn’t encounter the slowdown most of the time again. I stress-tested the system and was able to repeat the slowdown. It seems to be happening when the pagefile size changes. If it happens again I may just change the minimum and maximum size to be the same to see if that helps.

So progress, if not a permanent solution. I did create a separate drive for Ubuntu so I have that as a backup now. Since you can’t easily have two active boot drives at one time I installed a hard drive power switch module that allows me to turn individual drives on and off prior to starting the computer. So far I’ve had success with the PELOTE HD-PW4101 for around $22 on Amazon.

Hopefully, I can put off the major upgrade until next year.

I’m playing around with Pixaloop, animating some still photos, similar to Cinemagraph. Here are some samples so I can see how they look in WordPress:

I’ve been playing with SiteSpeed Insights from Google and based on the advice received, updated a few things on this site to speed it up.

In addition to Cloudflare and Jetpack caching, I also turned on lazy image loading from Jetpack, which doesn’t load images further down on the page until you scroll. It improved my score some but the difference in speed is noticeable to me.

I’ll have to spend more time digging into the recommendations but it seems pretty clear that you can’t wing it anymore. Fortunately there are lots of tools available for WordPress sites.

Once while on vacation we finally visited a far-away, not-on-the-way-to-anywhere kind of place we had been wanting to visit for years. It’s one of those destinations you see a sign for on a freeway but it’s too far off the exit so you keep passing it by, wondering what it’s like while pushing it off until some magical future trip when you’ll have the time. I actually started thinking we would never see this place and then one day such a magical opportunity presented itself. We were visiting family in another state and this was along the half way point. We had enough extra time for the couple of hours of extra driving that would be required and frankly wanted to see something different for a change. The side trip was wonderful and we enjoyed it thoroughly, including a meal at a nearby restaurant that served us food the locals probably enjoyed regularly. We soaked the area in and savored its flavors. I had been taught to not wear a hat at a table and to not put a hat on a table you’re eating off of, so out of habit I removed mine and placed it on the seat next to me. I distinctly remember pulling the chair out a little to help me remember it was there. It was one of those metal chairs that formed a pattern small food could fall through, the durable kind you can hose down after a messy barbecue. This hat of mine was one of my favorites because it fit me so well and it looked good on me, I think. It’s was a ball-cap made by Nike with the logo of the company I work for across the front, dark blue with white lettering. The sky threatened rain that day and much of our visit was outside so I grabbed the hat from the car and wore it all afternoon to keep sun and/or rain off my face. I leave this hat in our car specifically for this purpose. It wasn’t raining when we left the restaurant. We simply hopped in the car and drive a long, long way, until almost lulled into a trance from the rhythmic sound of our tires hitting the seams of the concrete road, a memory jogged lose and fell into my consciousness. Did I pick up my hat? I had a lot of time to think about it because we were too far to turn around. Maybe I put it in the pocket of my jacket or in the trunk. I would look when we arrived at our next stop. I thought of options in case it was left behind. I could call to see if they found it and would ship it to me or I could consider it lost. Would I be okay with that?

Fast forward a few days. I didn’t put it in my jacket or the trunk. Thankfully the restaurant did find it and was happy to ship it to me. I uncharacteristically gave the girl on the phone my credit card number so their shipping department (they have a mail order business) could send it to me. I asked that they not invest much into protecting the hat since it was flexible, suggesting they use a simple shipping envelop, like the Tyvek ones the post office uses. She said someone from shipping would call me to explain the charges. Three days later a package arrived – a nicely packed and protected box. My hat was nicely wrapped in protective paper. In the box was an invoice for $18, already charged to my credit card. My free company hat cost me $18. Had I known how much it was going to cost to ship this free hat to me, I may have been willing to let it go. It got me to wondering, how much would something have to be worth for me to rescue it? Is replacement value the only consideration? No. I’ve had this hat for years and there’s something about it that made me feel bad about abandoning it far away. It had ridden on top of my head for some neat activities over the years. I know it’s just an inanimate object but I liked it a lot so it was worth more to me than it would have been to anyone else.

Next time I think I’ll attach it to a belt loop at a restaurant but for now I’m going to wear it around for a while. It feels good to have it back.