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.

 

[RoZaD]

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.

This worked for me, at least for right now anyways. Thanks!

 

[ajkchawla]

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 so much! You're a life saver, I was thinking my HDD must have been EOL, checked task manager saw that it was very odd that utilization was 100% and never dropping down. Google searched and you saved me from buying a new HDD and having the same issue. Thank you again!

 

[Nana_1]

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.

Spent the last hour trying all the methods from the start of the thread, until i reach this post, yes the prob is caused by antivirus software Avast. I have not installed and finally can use my laptop. Thank you thank you.

 

[Hagayck4]

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.

Spent the last hour trying all the methods from the start of the thread, until i reach this post, yes the prob is caused by antivirus software Avast. I have not installed and finally can use my laptop. Thank you thank you.

YES! worked for me as well.

Did all the suggestions, replaced my Avast-free with Avira-free antivirus, disabled superfetch and windows tips. BUT- I've checked the possibility with defining the virtual memory to 1024* etc. , but it works much much better when leaving it as automatically set by windows.

Just checked the results by trying to peak my memory usage (what uncovered the problem with the system and compressed memory in the first place) and this seems to work very well. If before the peak to 100% HD use and memory peak got my computer stuck for minutes, now i can see the peaks, but it falls back after a second or two, and the computer runs smoothly.
Many Many thanks!

(ntoskrnl.exe; System and compressed memory process; win 10; 100% HDD use; High CPU usage)

 

[roundsdd]

Siddharth_12, Your problem could also be the automatic backup running and then finishing.

 

[DV8inPP]

I hadnt been experiencing any problems until yesterday, then things got all slow and 100% DU. Noticed AVG Free had updated itś core program yesterday so uninstalled it. Disk Utilisation still stayed at 100% but the system monitor disc MB/s figures dont add up. So I ran HD tune to check disc performance and watched the system monitor roughly match the hd tune figures whilst the system reported 100% disc usage.

HD Tune just reported max throughput at 134MB/s Min 2MB/s Average 80.9MB/s with DU at 100%. Now disc activity has dropped to 2%

 

[Danielle Spargo]

Get an SSD. Samsung recently came out with 3D memory chips so that they can produce a lot of SSD memory for really cheap. I just upgraded to a 500GB SSD, and kept my HDD for my movies and other media. I'll never ever ever ever go back to having my OS on an HDD. If you thought SSDs were out of your budget, the times are changing with this 3D stuff.

 

[Ed Chombeau]

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.

Get rid of any third party security suite; use Windows Defender; it's already in your W10 by default. my start up time is 20 seconds with an 7200 HDD. On my SSD Laptop it's 10 seconds.

 

[Leo_2002]

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.

It worked , thanks , Disk Performance got from 100% to 10-5% , but it's still crappy af .

 

[yiajiipamu]

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 so I tried this and I can only change the maximum, not the minimum as far as I can tell. Am I doing something wrong here? Thank you

 

[AQuietNight]

I
Get rid of any third party security suite; use Windows Defender; it's already in your W10 by default. my start up time is 20 seconds with an 7200 HDD. On my SSD Laptop it's 10 seconds.

My computer ran fine with Win 10 update until a week ago when my hard drive went 100%. I tried all the suggested tricks with no good result. I didn't change anything and the newest Win 10 updates didn't come through yet so I was a bit pressed for an explanation.

I did go into Task Manager/Open Resource Monitor and gave it a quick look to see if anything unusual was going on but any activity shown revolved around Windows operations. I played with the computer for another day and then went back to Open Resource and paid closer attention and saw Norton was causing a LOT of hard drive activity. The funny part was I let my subscription expire and according to Norton, the program was no longer functional. It appears that is not the case because even though Norton said I was no longer protected, the program was functioning on some level.

I used the Norton Uninstall Tool and the problem stopped. The hard drive activity typically now averages 0-2% with occasional brief spikes then settles back to 0-2%. I now use Windows Defender with all Windows 10 settings back to where Microsoft set them.

 

[jamesltoa4]

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.

Re the pagefile - consider:
do you want the system to shutdown an app/program that wants more memory than the OS will manage to allocate from the RAM and pagefile combined?
or do you want the system to slow to a crawl when an app/program needs more pagefile space than the minimum specified.
The crawl mode is good for letting you see out what is keeping the system running all night and still going in the morning.
The fail mode is OK if you are there to see the app/program stop and just disappear.

Me - I set pagefile max to the same as min, and have it at what I consider the maximum size of all the processes i will be running concurrently - remembering that 32 bit programs are unlikely to use more than 3GB, and your video may well be using 2GB or more of the main RAM
page file expansion seems to be in small increments - exercising the MFT and space allocation process - then similar system effort to restore each of those small space allocations to the unused space pool.
Also the expansions will inevitably be dispersed over a large area of the drive space pain with a rotating disk, not so much pain with a SSD.

So - NO expansion unless you want system slowdown.

 

[jamesltoa4]

[here is my post re pagefile lower down the hierarchy of the post, and:

For diagnosis -
Start task manager and from the performance tab open resource monitor
Then turn on all the columns of the Details view - then turn on More details

You will be looking for the high CPU usage (keeping the CPU busy)
of I/O bytes - read, or maybe something like windows update doing gigabytes of write, or heading towards reading all the OS partition content (keeping the drive from responding to the app/program's read requests)
There are also the key problem pointers - high Pagefile Delta and/or high Memory Delta and massive 'Other I/O'
The start command and description columns give a better idea of the key to google for more info.

Along with the search and other activities mentioned, there are:
the OS downloading large fixes
The OS indexing all files on the partition ( see the File Explorer properties tab on the partition - changing the tick box may cause a couple of hours activity creating the index, or removing entries from the index space - that you may also get back - ignore any access problems when clearing index entries - very unlikely to cause problems.
Microsoft/windows update can get itself confused and need Microsoft chat line technician remote access to fix it!

There is also the Drive/system image that may periodically scan the entire partition looking for changes so it can update the recovery image, and anti-malware drive (partition) scans - even realtime monitoring can cause problems with a facility reading lots of files - or just looking at the first few bytes may cause the real-time checking to read the entire file.
And - I'll add to the Microsoft\windows update - that it may, validly be applying fixes that may, or may not need a restart for the install to be completed, and the changes activated.
In the performance window - check for comms activity - bad connections or timeouts from a remote site can cause the system to appear to have ground to a halt while it repeatedly re-requests the response.
Oh! and that is without any hardware problems at your location!

So =- look for the system usage that seems unaccountable - and check with Google as to the purpose of whatever activity is apparently misbehaving.

 

[anwarc]

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, Just wanted to say thanks. Your solution worked like a charm. It still shows 100 disk usage when the computer starts but goes down within a minute. You are a genius my friend. I have been trying to solve this issue for 2 years now and was almost on the verge of giving up. Thanks again

 

[AlmightyHalfrican]

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%.

Just made an account to say thank you! This worked wonders for me.

 

[tacoma]

I had similar problem. Turns out my hard drive was going bad. I ran the HD diags found in bios set up options. It passed the quick test but failed the long test which took a few hours to run.

 

[Stefan_Dus]

Nothing in this thread has worked for me. I am still struggling with this HDD busy thing. I pinpointed it down to MAYBE being related to AV services. Disabling Windows Defender helped, but installing a 3rd party AV didn't => same problems. SSD is healthy according to Crystal.

 

[philef]

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.

Dude, thank you from the bottom of my heart !!!! ;-)

 

[DeanoV6]

Try uninstalling Skype Video by right-clicking on it in the start menu and selecting uninstall and see what happens to your disk utilisation
😉

(And if you still need Skype, use the normal Skype app instead).

 

[TechGenie]

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 u so much!!It works.Went from 100 percent to 4-6 percent on average.Again thank you!

 

[Wayfall]

Hi there

I was having this issue as i have been setting up a laptop at work for my colleagues to use for their conferences and i disabled the superfetch and windows search but disabling windows search stopped me from searching for programs that work over wise be unaccessable to me. Disabling only superfetch fixed the problem for me.

 

[jio66623]

I did everything for the superfetch and windows services and the pagefile settings. It fixed my resolution but its still at 100%. Help?!

 

[winstonconner]

By stopping
"Application Frame Host" from the task manager, I was able to succesfully decrease my disk usage from 99-100% to around 2%. -Winston C

 

[Wayfall]

By stopping
"Application Frame Host" from the task manager, I was able to succesfully decrease my disk usage from 99-100% to around 2%. -Winston C

Should we disable that in services.msc as well?

 

[usatrooper77]

I disabled the UPnP Device Host, and my disk usage instantly went from 100% to 9%. Must be a return of the memory leaks.