Slow drives, mostly HDDs, can hugely impact performance (but should not be causing crashes)
Task manager is not a great way to view utilization but it can do the trick most of the time. The important thing to realize is that the 20% metric refers to the all of the cores. If one core is running at 100% but the rest are sitting at 0 you’re going to see a low utilization even though that one core/thread. At the Performance > CPU screen change the graph to ‘logical processors’ rather than ‘overall utilization’ as it will give you a more accurate picture of what’s going on.
There’s a chance that you have a hardware problem, but these issues (when as bad as you’ve described) usually justify a fresh install of Windows.
Few things to consider:
Slow drives, mostly HDDs, can hugely impact performance (but should not be causing crashes)
Task manager is not a great way to view utilization but it can do the trick most of the time. The important thing to realize is that the 20% metric refers to the all of the cores. If one core is running at 100% but the rest are sitting at 0 you’re going to see a low utilization even though that one core/thread. At the Performance > CPU screen change the graph to ‘logical processors’ rather than ‘overall utilization’ as it will give you a more accurate picture of what’s going on.
There’s a chance that you have a hardware problem, but these issues (when as bad as you’ve described) usually justify a fresh install of Windows.