Disk usage always at 100%

[SagetheGoat]

I have had an HP Envy dv6 running Windows 8 for two years, Windows 10 for a week or two. The past two months, my computer has been running so sluggish that it's almost inoperable. Startup time has went from 5-8 minutes to 20, sometimes even 40 minutes. When it does load up to login, it takes an additional 20 minutes for me to even load up task manager.

My disk is constantly running at 100%, despite everything running at 0mb/s consistently. The things that go above that are the system, which will spike to 2.2mb/s, norton/Symantec framework which will hover at 0.2 at most, and a bunch of service host:local services (network) processes. HP support, and a bunch of other system background services also run at 0.1mb/s.

I've done a system reboot, which barely worked. I upgraded to 10, which worked for the first two times turning on, but soon went right back to being unresponsive. I've taken a lot of processes out of startup as well. I was unable to stop indexing services when I was on windows 8, despite running as admin.

 

[Slashgeek]

Open up a run dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing R. In the "Open" field, enter "services.msc". Look for "Windows Search" and "Superfetch."

Go to each of these entries. Right click on one and select "Properties." In the dropdown box labeled "Startup type," choose Disabled. After leaving the properties window, press "Stop" in the upper left corner. Do this for both.

 

[SagetheGoat]

I also disabled BITS in the process. So far so good, the computer startup time was under 8 minutes again. Thanks.

Edit-----
Nope. Back to being unresponsive 2 minutes into desktop.

Super edit-----
I've been sitting here waiting for the start screen to show up for ten minutes, thennfive minutes to be able to press the power button, and now I've been waiting another five minutes to press shut down. :c

 

[Slashgeek]

I also disabled BITS in the process. So far so good, the computer startup time was under 8 minutes again. Thanks.

Edit-----
Nope. Back to being unresponsive 2 minutes into desktop.

Super edit-----
I've been sitting here waiting for the start screen to show up for ten minutes, thennfive minutes to be able to press the power button, and now I've been waiting another five minutes to press shut down. :c

You may want to try a clean install using new installation media, which you can create with the media creation tool:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

 

[corprinus]

Ok, found a solution from another website, it's simple:
From the Windows Menu, go to Settings, then go to System and then go to Notifications and Actions. Turn off "Show Me Tips About Windows". That's it. It takes maybe a minute or two to lower the disk usage and I would recommend ending any process in task manager that's making the disk usage go up in the meantime. Usage percentage should go down and stay around 1-2%.

 

[david_192]

After trying stopping and disabling WSearch, superfetch and BIT all worked temporarily. the real culprit seemed to be the pagefile settings. go to control panel/system and security/system/advanced system settings under performance click settings, advanced tab click change, set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply. requires a restart. Stopped my 100% disk usage and windows now loads faster hope this helps.

 

[ElmerCV]

After trying stopping and disabling WSearch, superfetch and BIT all worked temporarily. the real culprit seemed to be the pagefile settings. go to control panel/system and security/system/advanced system settings under performance click settings, advanced tab click change, set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply. requires a restart. Stopped my 100% disk usage and windows now loads faster hope this helps.

Hey David, could you explain this part "set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply."

I have 8GB RAM, so what should by the min and max paging size?

 

[david_192]

After trying stopping and disabling WSearch, superfetch and BIT all worked temporarily. the real culprit seemed to be the pagefile settings. go to control panel/system and security/system/advanced system settings under performance click settings, advanced tab click change, set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply. requires a restart. Stopped my 100% disk usage and windows now loads faster hope this helps.

Hey David, could you explain this part "set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply."

I have 8GB RAM, so what should by the min and max paging size?

 

[david_192]

It would be 8 x 1024=8192 mb for the min and then double that 16384 mb for the max. I have not had an issue since adjusting mine.

 

[ElmerCV]

It would be 8 x 1024=8192 mb for the min and then double that 16384 mb for the max. I have not had an issue since adjusting mine.

Oh thank you, i was confused, i shall try it later hopefully this will work, i had already tried disabling services, notifications and everything they mentioned in the post but it didn't work, i will give it a try. thanks again!

 

[Halebopper]

Open up a run dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing R. In the "Open" field, enter "services.msc". Look for "Windows Search" and "Superfetch."

Go to each of these entries. Right click on one and select "Properties." In the dropdown box labeled "Startup type," choose Disabled. After leaving the properties window, press "Stop" in the upper left corner. Do this for both.

THANK YOU! This worked for me. I really appreciate it!

 

[Benpiggy]

Open up a run dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing R. In the "Open" field, enter "services.msc". Look for "Windows Search" and "Superfetch."

Go to each of these entries. Right click on one and select "Properties." In the dropdown box labeled "Startup type," choose Disabled. After leaving the properties window, press "Stop" in the upper left corner. Do this for both.

THANK YOU! This worked for me. I really appreciate it!

The solution by Mr. Slashgeek really works. Thank you !!!!

 

[Blipster]

After trying stopping and disabling WSearch, superfetch and BIT all worked temporarily. the real culprit seemed to be the pagefile settings. go to control panel/system and security/system/advanced system settings under performance click settings, advanced tab click change, set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply. requires a restart. Stopped my 100% disk usage and windows now loads faster hope this helps.

Awesome answer! Worked perfectly! Thanks so much! Saved my PC!

 

[AnthonyAragorn]

Open up a run dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing R. In the "Open" field, enter "services.msc". Look for "Windows Search" and "Superfetch."

Go to each of these entries. Right click on one and select "Properties." In the dropdown box labeled "Startup type," choose Disabled. After leaving the properties window, press "Stop" in the upper left corner. Do this for both.

Thanks man!!!!! I registred just to say thank you!!! you saved my laptop!!!!!

 

[Richard_007]

Open up a run dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing R. In the "Open" field, enter "services.msc". Look for "Windows Search" and "Superfetch."

Go to each of these entries. Right click on one and select "Properties." In the dropdown box labeled "Startup type," choose Disabled. After leaving the properties window, press "Stop" in the upper left corner. Do this for both.

That's it for sure. Many thanks.

FWIW there is other info on this thread about changing the swap file size which made me think back to WinXP and prior.
This has the effect of flushing the swap file so it might just be a case of a corrupted swap file which is not possible to delete unless you are in pure DOS (remember that and hope you can find the floppy!)

 

[bwcaman]

Open up a run dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing R. In the "Open" field, enter "services.msc". Look for "Windows Search" and "Superfetch."

Go to each of these entries. Right click on one and select "Properties." In the dropdown box labeled "Startup type," choose Disabled. After leaving the properties window, press "Stop" in the upper left corner. Do this for both.

That's it for sure. Many thanks.

FWIW there is other info on this thread about changing the swap file size which made me think back to WinXP and prior.
This has the effect of flushing the swap file so it might just be a case of a corrupted swap file which is not possible to delete unless you are in pure DOS (remember that and hope you can find the floppy!)

Just adding my thanks and encouragement to others to try some of the solutions suggested on this thread. After suffering for two weeks with a Dell E6510 laptop running Win/10 locked up and unusable due to 100% disk utilization and having tried several other suggestions to resolve the problem, finally one of the following did the trick:
Set page file size to min=RamSize and max=2*RamSize.
Disable the "SuperFetch" and "Windows Search" services.
I'm not sure which it was, but they didn't take long to configure and my disk utilization is now staying at low percentages.

--------------- 4/19/16 update:
I was too early in attributing the above configuration changes to solving my long standing 100% disk utilization problem after upgrading to Win 10 from Win 7. Unfortunately, the problem came back a little after I submitted the above information. That's the bad news.

The good news is a chat session with Microsoft support did, finally, solve this disk utilization problem permanently. In short, the solution was to uninstall Bitdefender. In all my weeks of searching for the possible cause of my problem, I had never encountered a suggestion that my anti-virus software might be the cause of the 100% disk utilization problem on Win 10. Because of that, I wanted to follow up here with that information in case it may help someone else who's suffering from these symptoms.

For reference, the following is the pertinent copy of the transcript of the MS support chat:

MS Support Rep: Windows 10 have some conflict with some third party anti-virus, because it has it's own anti-virus we called "Windows Defender".

Me:I installed Bitdefender free edition back in 2014 under the win/7 installation.

MS Support Rep: Oh I see possible it having conflict with your Windows 10 now, may I ask if you want to uninstall it?

After the uninstall of Bitdefender and subsequent reboot, the disk utilization returned permanently to normal levels.

 

[WindowUser]

Windows 10 taking four hours to boot up, 20mins to log in, 1min+ to respond to anything. The other day is said when booting up, "Disk read error, press Ctrl Alt Del to reboot", it did a memory test then booted up OK.

I carried out a new installation of W10 from media created on Microsoft website.

I have gone through all the other suggested answers on the various forum threads and tried the following but still no use:

Disabled Prefetch, Superfetch and Windows Search
Page file set to min=RamSize and max=2*RamSize
Disabled Onedrive and BITS
Turned off "Show me Tips About Windows"

I have been at it for six months now, yes 6 months and am now considering buying new hardware unless someone can come up with a miracle solution. The first person to come up with a solution for me that works, I will send so much positive energy your way you will fly...

 

[Siddharth_12]

I bought my hp laptop yesterday. i5 6th gen/ 1tb / 8gb / 6gb (2 gb dedicated + 4 gb integrated) . my laptop lags for simple tasks . I have nothing installed on it and haven't even started playing games on it. the strangest part is that it boots very fast (almost under 1 minutes). I recently noticed that my disk usage shows 99% and during those spikes my laptop lags . please help me solve this . thanx in advance.

 

[Richie_6]

I bought my hp laptop yesterday. i5 6th gen/ 1tb / 8gb / 6gb (2 gb dedicated + 4 gb integrated) . my laptop lags for simple tasks . I have nothing installed on it and haven't even started playing games on it. the strangest part is that it boots very fast (almost under 1 minutes). I recently noticed that my disk usage shows 99% and during those spikes my laptop lags . please help me solve this . thanx in advance.

Have you tried this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083595

 

[macusn]

I bought my hp laptop yesterday. i5 6th gen/ 1tb / 8gb / 6gb (2 gb dedicated + 4 gb integrated) . my laptop lags for simple tasks . I have nothing installed on it and haven't even started playing games on it. the strangest part is that it boots very fast (almost under 1 minutes). I recently noticed that my disk usage shows 99% and during those spikes my laptop lags . please help me solve this . thanx in advance.

Have you tried this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083595

Tried the Microsoft fix but I am using the iastora.sys driver which is not listed
Mac

 

[ERIC J]

After trying stopping and disabling WSearch, superfetch and BIT all worked temporarily. the real culprit seemed to be the pagefile settings. go to control panel/system and security/system/advanced system settings under performance click settings, advanced tab click change, set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply. requires a restart. Stopped my 100% disk usage and windows now loads faster hope this helps.

Thanks so much for this tip! I was having a disc usage at 100% until i tried your suggestion
now i do not.

 

[Art_Vandelay]

Ok, found a solution from another website, it's simple:
From the Windows Menu, go to Settings, then go to System and then go to Notifications and Actions. Turn off "Show Me Tips About Windows". That's it. It takes maybe a minute or two to lower the disk usage and I would recommend ending any process in task manager that's making the disk usage go up in the meantime. Usage percentage should go down and stay around 1-2%.

Thank you for this tip - worked for me!

 

[LadyStealth]

I tried the solutions mentioned here with SuperFetch and Wsearch and windows tips, but they did not work. I've been having this issues for months now, and it suddenly occurred to me that the issue only really happens with my Firefox browser - but it hangs up the whole machine. As of now it looks like the theme I added to my browser (64-bit btw) was causing an issue. I disabled it, and immediately my machine went quieter than I've heard it in ages. Three hours went by with no issue (YAY), so I went to bed. I've come back to the PC this morning, and again...my first thought was, dang it's quiet here... so I'll be working at the PC all day, I'll let you know how things have been.

Update 9 hours later - PC has been great all day, no further issues to report. There was one moment where I held my breath, but it truly was but a moment.

 

[Jugeum]

A friend of mine had this issue after he did an update to Windows 10, he paid to have a microsoft tech work on it and after a week of nothing working, they had him install a fresh copy of Windows 10 on the computer and that fixed his issue.

 

[MrEpic59]

After trying stopping and disabling WSearch, superfetch and BIT all worked temporarily. the real culprit seemed to be the pagefile settings. go to control panel/system and security/system/advanced system settings under performance click settings, advanced tab click change, set min to 1024 x your ram to convert to MB and set max to 2 x the min. click set, OK and apply. requires a restart. Stopped my 100% disk usage and windows now loads faster hope this helps.

Thank you soooo much, I have tried all of the methods and none of them worked, still leaving me at high 80's/90's with nothing open, OTHER THAN THIS ONE!
in all honesty though, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to provide this answer to people who need it because MS doesn't know how to optimize that well.