Hi guys,

Booted up my older (only about 3-4 years old) laptop and was immediately reminded of one of the reasons I updated (it wasn't the only one I promise!)

Hard disk is at 100% usage about 98% of the time - sometimes it will ease for a few mins, usually when the system has been turned on and is idle for a while, but always reoccurs. In the brief moments the usage goes down, laptop runs really well. When it's at the 100% it's mind numbingly slow. It's driving me insane.

I believe it to be a corruption in win 10, but at a loss how to actually fix it (there are so many articles, guides etc etc, and not one thing has worked for me).

As I hadn't turned it on in a year I have spent the last two days updating everything. I had hoped that since this seems to be a widescale, and lets be frank, probable microsoft issue, that maybe they'd worked it out. Of course this hasn't been the case.

I'm wondering if anyone has had this issue, and managed to resolve it. If this is the case PLEASE tell me how!

For reference the hdd health is fine. All diags return as normal.

Any and all help would be really appreciated

with my wife's laptop I find that often happens when either windows is updating in the background or the antivirus is running in the background. The only solution I've found is to wait it out.

Thanks for your response!

Unfortunately I think it sounds like a different issue, as this is happening despite any updates (all done) or anti-virus running (I don't have any on that particular computer while troubleshooting). It's so frustrating as it just sits there at 100% pretty much consistently, completely idle.
Seems like there's a million and one reasons this can happen, and I'm driving myself crazy trying to figure it out. Argh!

Hi Porce,

I recommend just reimaging your laptop, this will rule out so many factors, once reimaged, if the issue persists, it's safe to say the root cause is hardware corruption.

Back-up what you can, reimage and see if the issue persists. From there, we can start to look at what component is defected.

-Krawk

Thank you so much Krawk (btw, love the name! :D)

I've been trying to avoid it, but I think we're at that stage. I'm just in the middle of a chkdsk repair. Once that's finished, if the issue still persists (which I believe it will - could swear I've already tried this in the past) I'll move onto the reimage.

Fingers crossed!

have you tried sfc -scannow?
you can also try running programs such as ccleaner, Tweaking Windows Repair (I use this on a ton of pcs and it fixes a lot of issues)
if that doesn't work, back up important files and reformat as krawk mentioned and see if issue persists

i previously had a virus that did this and it disabled my windows update service and corrupted my whole windows.. had to reformat to fix it

This post was edited by Candyzcanes on Nov 24 2021 08:27pm