100% disk usage

Soldato
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I am getting a lot of issues with 100% disk usage and I believe it's the cause of a lot of staff complaining their laptops are running very slowly.

I've tried turning things on and off that i've found online but no joy.

I've also read that CMD chkdsk /f /r should be run to check them and it seems this usually sorts the issue.

I've been running this laptop for 4 hours now and it's stuck at 10%, which I've read is very common.

These laptops are win 8 - win 10.

Is there a better, faster way of doing the same thing? Linux live usb maybe?
 
Soldato
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if you have the microsoft process explorer tool it will show you which processes have largest IO delta r/w/r+w (but would have though task manager would show that too)
that is how you can nail down if it is the update process too
 
Soldato
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that's the problem, you've sometimes got dropbox, antivirus, windows services....it's not just a single process that's causing the issues. You can turn a lot of things off and it still sits there at 100%.
 
Soldato
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I mis-read your post - if chkdsk is stuck at 10% I think you just have to leave it to run and interrupting it now would be a bad idea .

But it sounds unlikely that disk corruption is the problem if you have multiple computers each with their own disk that are showing 100% use on their disk, so need to debug wit the task manger or process explorer on one machines

one issue with debugging is identifying the services (eg windows update) being run by a svchost process -
there are two tabs services/threads in process explorer that show this breakout.
 
Associate
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This might be unrelated but a family member had a laptop which took an age to do anything, showing 100% disk utilisation but the actual throughput numbers were trash.

Checking the event viewer showed lots of timed out operations and there were a few warnings in SMART too. The drive diagnostics in a GParted live CD also failed immediately, replaced the drive with an SSD and it runs fine.

A bit of a long shot considering you have a whole batch of laptops doing it but perhaps the drives are on their way out.
 
Soldato
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well. i took it home, ran it all night, tried things but to no avail.

This morning ive disabled compatTelRunner and disk usage dropped through the floor.

Restarted and it was back at 100%. compat wasn't running. left it for 5 mins and it was dropping again but it's still getting spikes from system, mcafee and dropbox.
 
Soldato
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Is the Dropbox folder fully synced? If it is, it should only do a periodic check with the server to verify that there are no new files for it to download.

McAfee could depend on what it's doing, any scanning tasks will bump disk i/o, the same if it's updating its virus database.
 
Soldato
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I saw this on a Windows tablet before, try a disk check then after a reboot it fixed it.

The tablet ran very slow whilst it was pegged at 100%

Done overnight, no difference.

Is the Dropbox folder fully synced? If it is, it should only do a periodic check with the server to verify that there are no new files for it to download.

McAfee could depend on what it's doing, any scanning tasks will bump disk i/o, the same if it's updating its virus database.

yep, fully synced but there are 15-20 people using it so it's making changes constantly.

I am wondering if it's something to do with the windows upgrade to win10. it looks like, after some digging about, all the affected laptops have been upgraded vs a fresh install.
 
Associate
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Does disk usage return to normal after 10-20 minutes?

On boot you will have many things competing for the rather limited i/o on laptops.

1) I suspect desktop machines have much less issues
2) These will probably be 500GB laptop HDDs

Things that need i/o just after boot

Windows Update
Drop box
AV startup scan
Windows search
Offline Files
BranchCache

I've found dropbox quite badly behaved in the past for this, but not as much as windows search.

Try this:

1) Mcafee disabled (last I looked you couldn't turn off the startup scan, at least on a personal version).
2) Windows search (indexing) service disabled
3) both of the above
4) Windows update service disabled

Windows search can often be the main cause, and limiting its scope along with disabling AV startup scan will bring things back to manageable levels.

Edit: Also a corrupt/broken windows search database will kill performance when it starts, try resetting it too under indexing.
 
Caporegime
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McAfee is quite likely to be a red herring tho, purely because it will show up any time there is disk/file access, thanks to it scanning all files that are read by other processes.

So it's not McAfee's disk access per se, it's just that McAfee takes a look first before the other process is allowed to read the same data.
 
Soldato
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I had this problem recently with the GF's W10 laptop. I couldn't figure it out.

Task manager would report 100% disk usage, but none of the processes would be anywhere near 100%. I tried disabling services, windows search, "shop me tips about windows 10" notifications. Loads of things. No luck.

I eventually did a fresh install.
 
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