Find out what's making your PC lag.
HitchWatch watches your PC while you work or play, then tells you in plain English what caused each stutter and what to do about it.
Version 0.3.0 · About 11 MB · Windows 10 (22H2) or Windows 11, 64-bit
Who it's for
Gamers
Hitches and stutters mid-match, even when the FPS counter looks fine. HitchWatch tells you whether it's the CPU, the graphics card, a driver or something else.
Developers
Builds that slow to a crawl, editors that hitch on keystrokes. See exactly which process or driver is eating your CPU time.
Artists and editors
Brush lag, timelines that stall, renders that crawl. Find out if it's memory pressure, a slow drive or the graphics card running out of memory.
Everyone else
If your PC feels slower than it used to and you don't know why, HitchWatch gives you a plain-English answer instead of a wall of graphs.
Why it exists
My PC had a lag I couldn't pin down. Nothing in Task Manager looked busy, and every guide said to update drivers and hope. When I finally measured how long Windows was keeping programs waiting, the cause turned out to be my Wi-Fi adapter running a driver from 2015. HitchWatch is that measurement, built into an app that explains what it finds and what to do about it, so the next person doesn't have to guess.
Samuel Venturini, founder
How it works
Open HitchWatch and leave it running. It watches in the background while you game, work, or edit.
Whenever your PC stutters, HitchWatch logs what was happening at that exact moment: CPU load, memory, disk, GPU, drivers.
Open the history and see each hitch with a plain-English explanation of the most likely cause and a suggested next step.
What it watches
Here's what a few diagnoses look like.
A driver hogging the CPU
"Failing: driver/hardware interrupts are slowing your PC; a driver is likely responsible."
Graphics memory full
"Failing: the graphics card's memory is full."
A processor slowing itself down
"Failing: the processor is slowing itself down, likely from heat or power limits."
A slow or ageing drive
"Degraded: the disk is responding slowly."
Drive-health readings need HitchWatch run as administrator.
Also watched: memory pressure, network adapter errors, Wi-Fi signal and Windows hardware error reports. Example screens.
It only looks
HitchWatch doesn't change settings, close programs or "optimize" anything. It runs on a normal user account. The one exception is drive health (SMART): Windows only shares those readings with administrators, so run HitchWatch as administrator if you want them. Without that, it says drive health couldn't be read instead of guessing. It never connects to the internet: no account, no analytics, no update checks. Its logs stay on your PC in %APPDATA%\HitchWatch, and it caps how much space they use.
Windows may warn you
HitchWatch isn't code-signed yet, so Windows may show a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway. You'll only see it once per version.
System requirements
Frequently asked questions
Tell us if it worked
The beta lives or dies on one question. We read every answer.
