Why Does My PC Do This?

[David87]

My PC (decent spec, less than a year old and Windows 10) does a couple of weird things that a) are related; b) come and go seemingly without rhyme nor reason.

PC will suddenly (the transition can happen when it's on - doesn't seem to be affected by power cycles) not see any devices on my home Wi-Fi network (printers etc.) and yet at the same time behave really weirdly with file movements from any local place to another (downloads to desktop, for instance). If you drag a file or folder to move, it'll take a few seconds (even for a tiny file) and then not appear to have actually moved. If you come out of the destination folder and back in, there is your document as it should be.

Both of things happen always together and will one day disappear. Stuff seems to be wrong about 70% of the time and will last for a few days or even weeks of not behaving as it should. Then, one day, it'll be fine for a few days and then go back to being odd again.

I've no idea what's wrong and it's driving me mad. Any ideas?! I'm generally a Mac user and so not really sure where to start as the problem seems so unusual!

[speedyman]

Difficult to do without actually logging on to the system, but here's a few things you can do. Make sure your antivirus is up to date and run a scan, check task manager when problems are happening, look for anything which is maxing out CPU, memory, disk, network. Check event viewer for errors or events.

[technobob]

You could try a couple of other checks after you have done a virus scan:
1: Right click on the start button and open windows powershell (admin) and type sfc /scannow hit enter. This should find and fix any bad system files
2: Right click on the start button and open windows powershell (admin) and type chkdsk /f/r hit enter, restart the pc when prompted and let it run - it will take some time.

Hope this helps

[hersh]

Sounds like an iffy wifi software/hardware

Can you try connecting a network cable /move the router closer to the pc

Might also be a close neighbour using the same wifi channel, you can download an app for your phone to check this

[hersh]

Oh
And make sure you check for any windows updates
If so update and check again and again until it comes back clear
Some updates trigger others

[flyingvisit]

A long shot, but my work Lenovo Thinkpad started playing up in a similar way due to CPU throttling, and the solution was to toggle Lenovo intelligent cooling by hitting Fn-T. But this doesn't even apply to all Lenovos (my home Lenovo doesn't have it), so it's probably totally irrelevant.

But keep an eye on the CPU usage in Taskmanager, Performance.