Windows Inside & Out · Task Manager & Performance · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: The Stuttering Game

Help a cousin find out why his gaming PC stutters after a driver update.

Jay's game started stuttering

Your cousin Jay saved up for a gaming PC. For months it ran his favorite game smoothly. This week the game keeps stuttering. It freezes for a moment, then jumps ahead. Twice it crashed to the desktop.

Jay remembers one change. Last weekend a pop-up from his graphics app offered a new driver, and he clicked Install. He has restarted the PC once since then, and nothing changed.

He asks you to help. You plan to use what you learned: the Performance graphs, the Processes list and Reliability Monitor. First you want to see when the trouble began and what changed around then.

What the timeline shows

You open Reliability Monitor on Jay's PC. The stability line sits near the top until last Saturday. That day there is a blue i: the new graphics driver installed.

From Sunday on, there are red X marks every day. Each one says the game stopped working. There were no crashes in the weeks before, and nothing else new was installed.

Checking the graphs

Before blaming the driver, you rule out other causes. You open Task Manager while Jay plays.

On the Performance page, the CPU is not maxed out. Memory has plenty Available. The Disk graph stays low. The GPU graph jumps up and down each time the game stutters.

Next you sort the running apps by CPU and then by Memory. Nothing else is hogging the PC. Power mode is set to Balanced and the PC is plugged in.

Fixing Jay's PC

Everything points to the graphics driver. The game ran well on the old one, and the trouble began the day the new one arrived.

You have two good options. You can roll back to the driver he had before, in Device Manager. Or you can check the graphics maker's official website for a newer version that fixes the problem.

Afterward, you will watch Reliability Monitor for a few days to make sure the red X marks stop.