100% disk usage on new laptop

mediabob · 28 Dec 2016

Hi,

So I bought this laptop the other day strictly for on the road work in excel/word and the like browsing and email. Nothing super intensive. It's not a great a great laptop by any stretch but it will meet my needs an it was cheap, only paid $115 for it brand new.

AMD Quad core E2 7110
4 GB Ram
500 GB HD
Windows 10

I am a gamer, so my main rig at home is a gaming rig. So my first impression of this thing was that it was sluggish, but I kind of wrote it off at being used to the speed of my desktop.

However today I finally decided it was way slower than it should be, so I dug in and found my disk usage stays at 100%, constantly and never drops. While searching I have found this seems to be an issue, but I cannot seem to find a resolution.

Here is what I have tired:

Disabled superfetch and Windows search at startup

Set my page file to custom (min ram max x2 ram)

Disabled windows tips

Unistalled/disabled ALL Antivirus, nothing is running on it atm

Uninstalled chrome and Skype (I read they can conflict)

I read a Microsoft article about a HDD driver issue, I'm not using that driver. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083595

Disabled Flash.

One drive is currently disabled.

All drivers etc up to date

If anyone has any other ideas I would love to hear them! THANKS!

Samuria · 28 Dec 2016

Welcome to the forum. Randomly stopping things won't help you need to know what's using the disk look at task manager sort on disk usage and see what it is

Caledon Ken · 28 Dec 2016

Welcome to the TenForums

Open Task Manager, click on Performance Tab, at bottom Open Resource manager, click on Disk Tab. Top windows is Processes with Disk activity. Hopefully the culprit will be listed there and you can see if it is reading or writing. If you expand lower window, Disk Activity it gives more detail.

mediabob · 28 Dec 2016

Samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. Randomly stopping things won't help you need to know what's using the disk look at task manager sort on disk usage and see what it is

Well that's part of the issue, nothing shows any extraordinarily high disk usage. In fact compared to my desktop all the standard running things are lower. That was something else that came up in my searches was that the culprit was rarely evident in task manager.

Caledon Ken · 28 Dec 2016

Have you tried a clean boot to see if behavior persists?

Caledon Ken · 29 Dec 2016

Could I also suggest sysinternal tools, diskmon. It states it captures all disk activities. Borg386 had suggested one of thier tools for memory mapping and I've been researching other options every since.

mediabob · 29 Dec 2016

That looks interesting I will give that a try thanks!

mediabob · 29 Dec 2016

So, turns out it was a Windows Update issue. Even though it wasn't showing in the task manager or resource management a task was running.

I ran the Windows Update Troubleshooter from here

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...troubleshooter

And it found all kinds of errors, fixed them all and restarted. Now it's running fine! Disk usage is down to nothing at idle.

Caledon Ken · 29 Dec 2016

You can also access trouble shooting on your device in case others are reading this. You type troubleshooting into cortana search bar and the top entry in returned items is Trouble Shooting in Control panel. Only trick is run it as administrator.