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Windows 10 Disk Usage

79wjd
By 79wjd
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I have an old laptop running W10 (i7 840qm, 8gb ram, 320gb 7200rpm hdd) and I noticed it's very sluggish. When I installed W10 about six months ago it was fast (considering it has an HDD), but I was doing something on it today and noticed it was painfully slow (minutes to boot up and after it was showing the desktop it took about a minute for task manager to open). The disk usage was pinned at 100% for about five minutes after reaching the desktop, and then went down and was fluctuating around 20-40%. I then started a windows update and it is now sitting at 60-100% usage. Everything else is low <20%.

 

Obviously, I could just reinstall windows, but I'd rather know what (probably) is causing the issue.

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There are very few souls who haven't had Windows 10 disk usage problems. I have a best friend who has a crazy fast m.2 drive and has it reach 100% usage because some windows defender thing was enabled. However, since this is a hard drive it could just be a dying drive or you have to many startup programs. So I would go into task manager and under startup programs disable everything except the programs that absolutely have to start when the computer is turned on.

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Can you use Resource Monitor to find what is using the disk?

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22 minutes ago, Orangeator said:

There are very few souls who haven't had Windows 10 disk usage problems. I have a best friend who has a crazy fast m.2 drive and has it reach 100% usage because some windows defender thing was enabled. However, since this is a hard drive it could just be a dying drive or you have to many startup programs. So I would go into task manager and under startup programs disable everything except the programs that absolutely have to start when the computer is turned on.

I actually haven't had any disk usage issues (at least none that I've noticed, but then I also have an SSD in my system and I only really use it for gaming). I haven't had a chance to run a SMART test, so I'll do that. And there are basically no startup programs. 

14 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Can you use Resource Monitor to find what is using the disk?

According to task manager, a lot of the time nothing is. 

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If you haven't run the machine in a quite a while, it will go through maintenance operations including indexing which can use quite a lot of the disk when the operation is on going.

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10 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

According to task manager, a lot of the time nothing is. 

Resource monitor, not task manager.

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1 minute ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

If you haven't run the machine in a quite a while, it will go through maintenance operations including indexing which can use quite a lot of the disk when the operation is on going.

It gets used on a daily basis, just not by me.

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21 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

It gets used on a daily basis, just not by me.

check to see if Windows Update is connecting to the server properly (if the drive in question is the boot drive or a startup drive).

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