Keyboard lag, mouse jitters and overall dreadful performance

[78ARB]

Having a great deal of performance issues with this 3 month old desktop: bad keyboard lag, mouse jitters, frequent "not responding" messages with Excel, Word and Outlook (Office 365) and Quicken (cloud version). These problems persist no matter what product I try. Typing a URL in Chrome can be pain. Rebooting solves these issues for maybe 5 minutes. All ideas welcome. Thanks.

[itsmyname]

After restarting, open the Windows "Task Manager" (use CTRL-ALT-DELETE, and then select it) and switch to its "performance" tab. That tab will show the percentage of "CPU-busy", the percentage of RAM being used, the amount of disk-drive usage per second, and the level of input/output through your network adapter.

Do you see high values for CPU, or the majority of your RAM being used, huge amounts of disk-drive and/or network activity?

It could be a virus-scan reading all your files. It could be "Windows Update" doing the "once-every-6-months" major update to Windows 10.

[78ARB]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately these problems occur throughout the day; even as I type this reply. The Task manager shows very little activity. Oddly, I opened Notebook and I could type as much as I wanted without any keyboard lag at all. The mouse jitter was still an issue when I tested typing in Notepad. One thing I did, with only an hours relief from these problems, was to switch off Bluetooth and every other related feature that I'm not using; figuring there might be a conflict with the keyboard and mouse wireless signal. For a short while everything seemed to work as it should. But as I said, that lasted about an hour before I was back to typing for 10-15 seconds without seeing what I was typing; and the **bleep** mouse cursor jumping all over the place; when it decides to move. But thanks again for your reply.

[itsmyname]

> The Task manager shows very little activity.

Your desktop computer:  https://support.hp.com/ca-en/document/c06783793

has 8 cores, each running at 2.9 Ghz (or faster). 

So, it could take a lot of "computing" before the CPU-graph shows a significant percentage of usage of those 8 cores.  Compare to safely driving your Lamborghini in a school zone -- it can go much faster than the legal speed in that zone.

Check/replace the batteries in your wireless keyboard/mouse.  Or, power them off, and connect a "wired" keyboard and a "wired" mouse, to see if that reduces the "jitters".