PC Slowing to Crawl

[PsyberMind]

I'm not exactly sure what's going on here.. I am running a Dual Xeon E340 with 20GB RAM, Windows 10.. (I know it's server grade hardware, but it was very inexpensive, and it's a workhorse)

At first boot up, the PC Behaves normally. Very fast, very responsive, like it always has.  I have no problems whatsoever.

After about.. maybe.. 6-7 hours of continuous operation, however, the machine slows to a bare crawl.. Drag/Drop operations are lagged beyond beleive. (Move a window, the mouse moves to the location you want it, the window takes about 2 minutes to reposition itself, and it moves frame by frame) The start menu becomes inaccessable, the task bar takes an eternity to appear, things like that. I literally have to "One Finger Salute" the machine to get it to reboot at this point, which is, I know, BAD on the drives (It's a 4TB RAID 10)

Done the usual suspects, malware, defrag, clean out old files, etc... Nothing..

At first, I was thinking that it was overheating, but I've since replaced the cooling system on the machine to no avail.
2nd Thought was that it was a power drain from the CPU, but running CPU-Z tells me I'm not losing a single unit of power throughout the day..

What could I be missing?

This started about 6-8 months ago, and I've had the machine almost 3 years now..

[DaveLembke]

I'd run memtest86 on the system and make sure you dont have a RAM issue that builds over time. Additionally look at the system resources when it first boots and all services are loaded, write down free memory and CPU average use. When it starts to act up look in task manager and see what you have for free memory and what the CPU is doing for activity. If the CPU is busy look at the service or application that is hogging the CPU.

While its not Windows 7 and your using Windows 10. I had a similar issue with one of my 8-core FX-8350 systems where after a period of time my system would eat up its RAM and CPU would be around 90-100% for all 8 cores. Come to find out it was a Windows 7 bug. I was able to patch for this bug and fix it. In the past other things also caused similar problems such as a version of Firefox browser that had a memory leak and consumed resources over time until all RAM was used up and the system went into heavy paging ( use of the hard drive as virtual memory ) which lagged out the system with memory all used up for nonsense due to leak.