Did Windows Update slow down my gaming performance?

[Cyber Akuma]

I am building a new gaming system, considering that the screen is only 1920x1080 resolution, from most benchmarks I have seen, the i7 and GTX670 I put in it shoul be enough to handle any current game at highest settings at a playable framerate.

So I put in a temporary junk HDD and installed Windows 7 (64bit professional) just to test it out and try different configurations on it before I install it for real on the actual system drive.

After downloading the demos to known hardware-straining games like Crysis and Metro 2033 I was pretty satisfied with the performance.

Evetually, I ran windows update and installed all recommended and optional (except for Bing Desktop) updates. After several reboots and re-updates to make sure everything was installed I shut it down.

The next day I start it up again and notice that it was taking two to three times as long to boot up..... fair enough, I did just install many updates. But now I noticed that performance had taken a total nosedive as well. For some reason it took several minutes after the desktop had loaded for any program to actually start up. The Crysis demo (even with vsync turned on from the console) had massive tearing where there wasn't any before, and the Metro 2033 demo had slowdowns, especially when turning!

I suspect its MSE thats causing it (I am going to install NOD32 as my real antivirus anyway) but is there any way I can test what could be causing this lag in case it isn't MSE? I can't just not run Windows Update after all, that would be beyond stupid, especially on a fresh install. Pretty much the only thing that changed between the last time I ran those demos and now was installing updates.

Any good way to see what might be bottlenecking it's gaming performance?

 

[CrimsonKnight13]

Have the newest NVIDIA drivers?

 

[MrGuvernment]

turn of windows search / indexing, after any new install with windows vista,7 and 8, it indexes all items in the system pretty much and sets up things for superfetch, it is basically optimizing your computer the first few times you use it.

a clean install with nothing will always be faster than anything else.

check your HD activity

 

[bigdogchris]

I have a crappy SSD, but even then, I notice a big performance drop and overall system response loss when I install the OS on an HDD in my system to test something (like how my system performs on an HDD compared to my SSD).

The solution is to set up the system so that the performance degrades the slowest, because there's no preventing system performance degradation on an HDD. SSD's suffer this too but it's much slower because latency doesn't change due to fragmentation.

The only real way your going to keep the performance up on an HDD is to partition off like 50 GB to install the OS (With SP1 integrated), then disable Windows Update. Also set the page file to a static amount (min/max the same). Use the remaining space to create another partition to install applications and store data on. I know it sucks not being able to patch up but it's the life of an HDD. The constant overwriting and fragmenting of files that the OS uses will quickly degrade an HDD's performance.

I say this because once you start patching over files in the Windows directory, no amount of defragging is going to fix files that are no longer sequential on the drive (the only thing an HDD is good at is sequential reads), so just keep the c:\ drive untouched on HDD's and the performance will degrade the slowest.