Disk activity spikes to 100% every few minutes - System lockup

JayEm · 31 Jul 2016

Hi,

A couple of days ago, I took up the free offer of Windows 10 just before the deadline. Instead of doing an upgrade from Windows 7, I performed a fresh install onto a brand new 240GB SSD. The installation process went smoothly, no errors and the activation service accepted my Windows 7 key just fine.

However, I've got the common 100% disk activity problem and I've tried all the fixes but still no luck. I've disabled superfetch, the indexing system and BITS (which keeps switching itself back on like some kinda malware would do). I've also increased the pagefile size as recommended but still no fix. What else can I do??

I think I might just go back to 7, which feels far more stable. Even my Xubuntu install of 5 year old hardware feels more robust! I'm pretty sure the constant disk activity is going to considerably decrease the life of any SSD too.

simrick · 31 Jul 2016

JayEm said:

Hi,

A couple of days ago, I took up the free offer of Windows 10 just before the deadline. Instead of doing an upgrade from Windows 7, I performed a fresh install onto a brand new 240GB SSD. The installation process went smoothly, no errors and the activation service accepted my Windows 7 key just fine.

However, I've got the common 100% disk activity problem and I've tried all the fixes but still no luck. I've disabled superfetch, the indexing system and BITS (which keeps switching itself back on like some kinda malware would do). I've also increased the pagefile size as recommended but still no fix. What else can I do??

I think I might just go back to 7, which feels far more stable. Even my Xubuntu install of 5 year old hardware feels more robust! I'm pretty sure the constant disk activity is going to considerably decrease the life of any SSD too.

Hi JayEm and welcome to Tenforums.

Hmmmm.....normally I would expect this on an upgrade of an OEM system, with bloatware issues. But, you did a clean install. Have you made sure the firmware of the SSD is current? Also your Chipset/MB BIOS? That's about all I can think of - it looks like you've done everything else on the list. The Anniversary update comes out this week; maybe that will help as well.

DavidY · 31 Jul 2016

I would check your other drivers too.
On my old laptop (which is from XP days and therefore has old drivers), sometimes when the computer appears to hang with the disk is being hammered, plugging something in the headphone socket clears it, which makes me suspect some other driver is doing something to require a lot of disk access.

simrick · 31 Jul 2016

DavidY said:

I would check your other drivers too.
On my old laptop (which is from XP days and therefore has old drivers), sometimes when the computer appears to hang with the disk is being hammered, plugging something in the headphone socket clears it, which makes me suspect some other driver is doing something to require a lot of disk access.

Good point!
A list of installed applications might help as well.

JayEm · 03 Aug 2016

Ok, so update: I tried installing the latest chipset drivers following your recommendations, also found out how to permanently disable BITS but still no luck.

I've given up and gone back to 7! There was nothing groundbreaking about Windows 10 anyway, just looks a bit fresher and starts up a bit faster (shuts down slower though I found. I'm guessing it goes into some kind of hibernation and writes everything in RAM to disk??), so meh. Won't be missed!