When Your PC Slows Down, It Might Be Time for an Update

I use a Microsoft Surface Studio as my daily workstation and rarely shut it down or restart it unless Windows forces an update.

Recently, the entire OS became sluggish, with Chrome freezing the system when loading pages with large tables. At first, I tried closing unnecessary applications and clearing some memory, but the issue persisted. Even simple tasks, like switching between windows or opening the Start menu, felt laggy. Eventually, I decided to reboot, which immediately triggered the installation of pending updates.

After the reboot, everything returned to normal—Chrome no longer froze, and the overall system performance improved significantly. It made me realize that prolonged uptime without installing updates might lead to performance degradation over time. While Windows is designed to manage memory and resources efficiently, certain updates—especially those related to security, drivers, or performance improvements—may require a reboot to take effect.

So, if your OS starts feeling slow or unresponsive, it could be a subtle reminder to install any pending updates. Keeping your system up to date not only ensures better performance but also enhances security and stability. Moving forward, I might reconsider my habit of avoiding restarts and make regular updates part of my maintenance routine.

Windows becomes slow and the solution may be just to install the updates?

Browsers Consume a Lot of Memory

One reason a system becomes sluggish is that browsers (Chrome and MS Edge) don’t release memory properly. Since I rarely restart my computer or close my browser, my Chrome and Edge often have many tabs open. Even after closing the program, the browser processes may still linger in memory without being correctly freed.

I usually forcefully terminate the processes using the following commands:

taskkill /im:chrome.exe /f
taskkill /im:msedge.exe /f

## Or terminate both Edge and Chrome in one line
taskkill /im:msedge.exe /im:chrome.exe /f

This (one command of taskkill on Windows) will ultimately free up memory (RAM) that are occupied by the Edge and Chrome Browsers.

Using one command to batch kill/terminate all the processes that belong to Chrome and Edge Browsers.

Windows Tools/Tips

• When Your PC Slows Down, It Might Be Time for an Update
• Use DirectX Diagnostic Tool (dxdiag) to View System Information
• Enabling the Debug Console for WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux)
• Hot Weather Causes Intel CPU Throttle and NVidia GPU Crashes on Windows 11 (Blue Screen)
• Two Windows Tips: Turn Off Delivery Optimization and Tweak Privacy Settings
• How to Enable the "God Mode" of Control Panel on Windows?
• Boost System Performance By: Switching to Best Performance Power Mode at Power & Battery on Windows OS
• Laptop Battery Power Drained But Failed to Sleep on Microsoft Windows Surface Studio Pro
• How to Fix a Slow/Incorrect Clock on Windows?
• The Ubuntu Sub System (New Bash Shell) in Windows 10
• How to Lock out (WorkStation) on Windows?
• How to Use Windows 10 - Storage Space to Combine Multiple Physical Harddrives?
• From Windows 1.0 to Windows 10

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —