I get that on my fairly high end Windows 10 laptop. I resort to rebooting it nightly. Windows Defender does like to go completely nuts occasionally as well.

I've got to complain though. I spend more time pissing around working around issues than doing anything productive on this infernal pile of dung.

Windows Defender is one of the worst AV when it comes to performance impact. I would rather have no AV than deal with its overhead (I am running third-party AV software though).

Annoying because it used to be pretty good.

I think after about a week, the Windows Search Index goes to work. I only noticed it because it caused my mouse cursor to go from pointer to hourglass every 2 seconds. Went on for about 3 or 4 days.

I dual boot with manjaro and Windows is significantly slower. It's probably just Windows.

Ctr-alt-delete/ task manager, will show you what is using the most cpu.

Ctrl+Shift+Esc is the superior shortcut in my opinion ;)

same, and I have done all this -- the issue is my box is subjectively and obviously lagging, but perfmon shows like zero util...

Its just weird.

Move any windows around if it is not instant, save everything (just in case) and kill dwm.exe (DWM will restarts on its own) Seems to be a bug that it slowly gets slower and slower especially if many windows are open.

I couldnt find that process in W11... however - I did a hard reboot and it came back to normal, but first I went in and turned off a lot of autostart cruft - but after doing that I rebooted and it still didnt fix it until the hard reset.

Its name is simply "Desktop Window Manager" but the process is dwm.exe the file is under \Windows\system32\dwm.exe

Its defensively there without it there would be no desktop environment visible.

Ah - I am an ideout.

I was looking for "DWM.EXE" in Here: https://i.imgur.com/qz53ome.png

And as you can see, I didnt equate the two.

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An aside: this really reveals how much knowledge in one's field disappears over the years... I have been a windows admin and everything since windows 3.1....... etc.

But when youre doing other things years after that, on the 'meta' levels, if you will.... christ -

I used to bullseye Exchange DB Corruption in my IBM T42 back home. They're not much bigger than a couple hundred gigs.