My PC is lagging, and I have no idea why

Hey there

My little brother picked up a new PC less than three years ago, but lately, everything has just been crawling... even trying to play Fortnite is a disaster, dropping down to like 2 FPS.

You can check out the specs here; he's running Windows 10. We've tried the usual stuff—cleaning out the system, using various apps to free up some space—but honestly, nothing seems to touch it, and even though the CPU temps look fine, the performance is just trashed...

Thanks for any help you can give

Could be anything, really...

Do you have at least 20GB of free space on your main SSD?
Maybe a Windows update is running in the background?
What does Task Manager and the performance tab show—is something constantly eating up your CPU or GPU?
Have you checked for any malware? Maybe run a scan with Malwarebytes anti-malware software.

There’s plenty of room left, so the first thing I did was clear out a bunch of junk files... My anti-malware software flagged a few nasty bits and wiped them clean, but honestly, it hasn't really done anything for the performance. As for the Task Manager, everything looks pretty normal on that front. I can see there's a Windows update waiting, but I just can't bring myself to believe that's the culprit. It feels more like a hardware issue, though I haven't the slightest clue how to go about testing that...

Download Memtest and check if your RAM has finally given up on life.

Windows Faster without Tools

Close out all your programs first, then hop into Task Manager and sort everything by resource usage so you can see what's actually eating up your system. For me, my hard drive was absolutely going haywire even when I wasn't doing anything at all. Turns out? It was just an antivirus program acting up.

I honestly think you just need to get those graphics drivers installed!
Without them, you aren't getting any hardware acceleration at all. You're basically stuck running on those basic Microsoft generic drivers, and trust me, even if you had the most powerful NVIDIA card on the planet, it would barely be able to render a single frame properly without the right software!