Usually it’s one of a couple things
- Something is running in the background and eating up all the resources. If you press ctrl+alt+delete (at the same time) there’s an option there that says “Start Task Manager”. Start that and switch to the “processes” tab then sort by “CPU” by clicking that heading. If there’s anything consistently above 30 percent or so, that’s your problem.
- Also sort by memory and see if anything jumps out there. If you’re not running anything else, your top few should be “chrome.exe”. (chrome also has a task manager so you can see what site is causing issues there if you have a lot open)
- It’s also possible some recently installed program is causing issues, but that’s less likely if nothing jumps out from the steps above. But you can check what was installed most recently by going to Start->Programs->Programs and Features and then sorting by the “Installed On” column to see when the last version was updated.
- Finally, just make sure you have disk space available. If your disk is anywhere near full, it causes all kinds of issues. The easiest way is to right click on the start button and select “Open Windows Explorer”, go to “Computer” on the left and it should show your drives and space available. Anything less than 10GB free could be a problem.
I’d guess a program is either installing updates or trying to sync files (dropbox, google drive) and that’s making everything else wait in line. That’s the most common cause.
If that’s not the case, then there may actually be a problem. But I wouldn’t change any settings until I knew what it was. You can flip all the switches on your machine, but if the problem is your ISP, it’s not going to help.