You might notice that a Ryzen processor with multiple Core Complex Dies runs a demanding application at lower performance than expected. The system appears to ignore half the cores, leaving them idle while one CCD handles the entire load. This behavior is caused by the Windows 11 core parking scheduler, which locks workloads to a … Read more
You open Performance Monitor Perfmon on Windows 11 and see that NDU.sys is consuming an abnormally high amount of non-paged pool memory. This memory leak can cause system slowdowns, application crashes, and even blue screen errors over time. The root cause is the Network Diagnostic Usage NDU driver, which collects telemetry about network usage and … Read more
When you compile code frequently, Microsoft Defender Antivirus scans every new file in your build output folder. This real-time scanning can slow down builds by 20 to 50 percent because Defender checks each executable and library as it is written. The scan is triggered by file write and rename operations inside the folder. This article … Read more
You notice your Windows 11 PC fans spin up and disk usage spikes at 2 AM, even though the computer was idle for hours before midnight. Windows Automatic Maintenance is designed to run when the system is idle and on AC power, but it has a hard deadline of 2 AM by default. This article … Read more
Your C drive is losing space even though you did not install anything new. You check your disk usage and discover a large .etl file in the Windows system folder. This file is created by pktmon, the built-in packet monitor tool that runs in the background. pktmon captures network traffic and writes the data to … Read more
Memory compression in Windows 11 compresses parts of the system memory to reduce the amount of data written to the page file. When the page file grows unusually large or the system becomes sluggish under moderate memory loads, memory compression may be masking underlying page file pressure. This article explains how to temporarily disable memory … Read more
The Windows.edb file is the database that powers Windows Search indexing. On many Windows 11 systems, this file can grow past 5 GB and sometimes exceed 10 GB. The primary cause is the sheer volume of indexed content, especially emails, file metadata, and system files. This article explains why the database expands so much and … Read more
When you run iperf throughput tests on Windows 11, you may see results far below your network’s actual capacity. One common cause is the network adapter’s hardware offload features, such as Large Send Offload and TCP Checksum Offload. These features are designed to reduce CPU load by letting the network card handle packet processing. However, … Read more
When a program or service slows down your Windows 11 startup, you need a tool that captures every file system, registry, and process activity during boot. The Sysinternals Procmon Boot Logging feature records all operations from the moment the system starts until you stop the trace. This article explains how to configure, run, and analyze … Read more
If you notice your Windows 11 PC has 4 GB of RAM consumed as soon as it boots even when no applications are running, Hyper-V auto-start is the likely cause. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s built-in virtualization platform. When its auto-start feature is enabled, it reserves a fixed memory pool for virtual machines that start with the … Read more