Question What is with this 100% disk usage?

[4g63T]

So i have an acer aspire E 15 laptop and its a pretty good one i5 8th gen with 4gb of ddr3 ram but i'll be upgrading that, and 2 tb of hdd. The problem is everytime I open it up it takes about 5 minutes to boot or just 3 minutes if im lucky. Then when it did boot up it is unusable because of the hdd being used 100% by something else (sometimes system, sometimes updates, or just random stuff). Its not intended for gaming but i did used it for light gaming like osu (that game can run even on a potato pc) but its primarily for editing (lightly) and browsing. The hdd is the only problem i see slowing the system down, the ram barely reaches 90% and the cpu too (max boost of 3.6 ghz with 4 cores). Any fix to this? i have tried disabling windows update, uninstalling unnecessary stuff, i tried cleaning but it didn't work. Will reformating it solve the problem? because sometimes it wont even boot to windows and will just be stuck on acer loading screen.


side note: i have a pc and it doesn't have this kind of problem, is this exclusive to laptops only?

 

[PC Tailor]

Have you run virus and anti-malware scans?
Have you run disk cleanup and defragmentation?
Have you disabled startup programs?
How old is the drive?
Is your BIOS up to date?
Are drivers up to date?

Try running crystaldiskinfo and seeing if there are any physical problems with the drive.
You can also grab a screenshot of the processes in Resource Manager that are using up your disk usage.

 

[4g63T]

Have you run virus and anti-malware scans?
Have you run disk cleanup and defragmentation?
Have you disabled startup programs?
How old is the drive?
Is your BIOS up to date?
Are drivers up to date?

Try running crystaldiskinfo and seeing if there are any physical problems with the drive.
You can also grab a screenshot of the processes in Resource Manager that are using up your disk usage.

i cant do any of those because i can't boot to os right now but i have disabled all startup programs, my graphics drivers is up to date, the bios i mnto sure. I've also done disk clean up yesterday, also i have no anti-malware software installed

 

[PC Tailor]

also i have no anti-malware software installed

This could be an issue - malware can easily cause performance issues.

Also if now you can't boot at all, then a clean install will rectify the issue if it is software.
However if the drive is older, it could well be failing. But I would sooner go to SW first.

Are you able to get into the recovery environment to perform a refresh, reset, or system restore?

 

[4g63T]

This could be an issue - malware can easily cause performance issues.

Also if now you can't boot at all, then a clean install will rectify the issue if it is software.
However if the drive is older, it could well be failing. But I would sooner go to SW first.

Are you able to get into the recovery environment to perform a refresh, reset, or system restore?

not possible its been an hour and all i see is black screen, i'd probably just bring it to someone that can fix it since i dont know how to clean install without access to bios.

 

[mdd1963]

laptops using 5400 rpm drives rival watching paint dry for bootup, and, if not used in a while, naturally there will be a huge flurry of activity downloading new WIndows updates periodically...

Get an SSD, and enjoy life! (A Corsair MX500 1 TB SSD is $119, and a 500 GB unit is about $60-$69...)

 

[4g63T]

laptops using 5400 rpm drives rival watching paint dry for bootup, and, if not used in a while, naturally there will be a huge flurry of activity downloading new WIndows updates periodically...

Get an SSD, and enjoy life! (A Corsair MX500 1 TB SSD is $119, and a 500 GB unit is about $60-$69...)

I'd love to, but since i recently upgraded my pc i dont think i have budget for that, i could get a 120 gb instead but i don't think its enough. I will try to find a cheap atleast 240gb sdd and choose if i upgrade the ram or not.

 

[popatim]

Run Performance monitor and go to the Disk tab.
"Processes with Disk Activity should already be expanded so you see stuff under it. Please expand Disk Activity section also, by clicking the down arrow on the right side of it's bar.

In the processes section, see what is happening more. Reads or writes. Then in the Disk Activity section click that column (Reads or Writes) from step one so that the list is sorted from the most to least. (Clicking a second time will reverse the sort so if you get low numbers then just click it again so highest is on top)

Now take a screenshot, host it on an image sharing site such as tinypic, or imgur, and post a link to the image here.
Try to capture as much of the Disk activity section as you can by dragging the Storage section lower (there is a drag bar between the two fields) Thanks!