Windows Game suddenly developed extreme lag on my Windows laptop

[Melendwyr]

And by "extreme", I mean that even starting the program involves waiting between three and four minutes after clicking on the link before the game window appears. Loading anything, even the "create a new character" screen, can take so long that Windows pops up a "this program has stopped responding" message, and even changing one of the appearance options creates a delayed response of roughly a second.

At first I was worried that, after Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10, I'd somehow picked up a hostile program that was sapping my computer's resources. But neither my antivirus nor antimalware scans showed anything, and more importantly other resource-intensive programs have been completely unaffected. It's ONLY Stardew Valley that's gone nuts.

I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game from the latest GOG version, sacrificing a very promising farm in the process, but the new installation behaves exactly the same.

Whatever's causing this, it changed literally overnight, and none of the suggested fixes for SV lag issues I've tried have changed anything. My laptop used to run the game just fine, to the point that I could even listen to a podcast at the same time without either program having problems or the laptop being stressed, but now the game is basically inoperable.

Please, if you can offer any suggestions, I'm getting desperate.

 

[BeenASon]

It's either my boy your laptop's cpu and gpu committed suicide or your OS committed suicide. It could be Windows 10. Maybe try reinstalling the entire OS? Stardew can run on my tablet which has like one and a half carrot's worth of cpu power. Perfomance degradation is definitely real especially if the laptop is extremely old and has seen major use. My tablet could run PSP games easily at the start of it's lifespan but few years later it has committed suicide and crys whenever I run even Patapon on it. Could be a lot of junk on your laptop and no storage free. I tried the Gog compatibility version on my R36S which is much weaker than any laptop and it ran perfectly just with long loading times.

 

[Melendwyr]

Perfomance degradation is definitely real especially if the laptop is extremely old and has seen major use.

Nothing else is having problems. It's not a defragmentation problem, nor a disk error problem, and other resource-intensive programs are operating just fine. I see no reason to think there's anything wrong with my operating system or central processing unit.

 

[BeenASon]

Nothing else is having problems. It's not a defragmentation problem, nor a disk error problem, and other resource-intensive programs are operating just fine. I see no reason to think there's anything wrong with my operating system or central processing unit.

Then try older versions of the game. Also try the compatability version. Send your specs too.