After receiving reports of sluggish system performance and occasional crashes on a particular office computer, you decide to investigate. You have confirmed that these issues have started occurring after the user recently installed new software which significantly increased the system's workload. What's the NEXT step to determine the issue?
Verify if any recent system or driver updates were installed that may be incompatible with the current system configuration and causing the slowdown.
Run antivirus scan to check if the system has been infected with malware, which might be causing reduced performance and instability.
Monitor the CPU and RAM usage through the operating system's performance monitoring tool to observe if the system's resources are overutilized when the software is running.
Inspect the internal hardware components such as the motherboard and processor for any signs of damage that might be causing the crashes.
Observing CPU and RAM usage in Task Manager or a similar application helps in understanding whether the recent software installation is placing an excessive load on the system resources, leading to performance issues and potential crashes. This aligns with the hypothesis and offers a straightforward way to validate it. While verifying recent updates or checking for malware are sensible steps, they do not directly correlate with the recent change mentioned by the user. The symptoms described don't necessarily point towards a hardware failure, making the option of inspecting internal components less relevant as a next logical step.
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