How often have you had the infamous “my computer is slow” complaint from a user? We all have experienced it, when your computer is running slow or someone calls and you just cannot seem to find what is causing it? How many times have we seen where a technician just runs a computer cleanup or some work around to speed it up? Does it last? Never for very long.

So how do we fix it? How do you know what is really wrong? Where is that root cause? Well, Microsoft in their wisdom has created a tool called MSDT or the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool to help their technicians diagnose and resolve issues from customers. Why can’t we use the same tool? Well we can!

There is a selection of different diagnostic tools available for use as part of the MSDT

https://home.diagnostics.support.microsoft.com/selfhelp

https://home.diagnostics.support.microsoft.com/selfhelThe tool can be used on the computer you are on, or on a computer not connected to the internet.

In this case, we will be searching for “Windows Performance Diagnostic” once you have it selected just download the package. This creates a diagnostic package that will download as an .exe file to gather all the information relevant to performance issues. Since this was designed to gather information and send it to Microsoft you will have the option to submit the reports to Microsoft. Just uncheck the box to transmit them to Microsoft and save a copy for yourself. The MSDT will gather all the files in a .cab file that you can open with windows explorer. Once you have the .cab file save then you can open the files and see all the reports. In this case we will need to review the summary report and performance reports. The reports will be available in .txt and .html files.

Now that you have all the information available, you can go through and look for issues that would cause slow or bad performance. The rest is up to you, there are too many different things that could cause slow performance to detail them all.

It is always better to find what is at the root of an issue, rather than bandaid fixes.

Happy Hunting 🙂