Windows 10: Need help narrowing down cause of 100% disk use

Hi there!I've been having problems with 100% disk use on my HP Pavilion Laptop for a long time a year?, generally without seeing what I would imagine are high read/write rates. It's gradually gotten to the point where the machine is super slow from 100% disk use about half of the time, which as I'm sure you can imagine is very aggravating. It's an HDD, and the current OS version is Windows 10 Home Version 1909. I have only 8GB of RAM, but this happens even when I'm using only 60% of it or less.I've read some of the other threads on this forum about similar issues, but I'm only moderately tec

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Need help narrowing down cause of 100% disk use

Does it tell us anything that I've been continuing to experience these episodes of 100% disk and dramatically-reduced performance without the Command Timeout Count continuing to increment? It has gone up by one in the last couple days, but the thing with the disk has happened at least three separate times over that period.

Okay, I did this first because it was the simplest. I need help interpreting the results though, because I have no idea what I'm supposed to expect. Here are two tests done while the system was (already) experiencing 100% disk use and reduced performance:








And here's one done when the system was operating normally (not 100% disk use or reduced performance):





I don't have an external HDD available, but in case it's of any use, I ran the test on a USB thumb drive too. The first is during the episode of reduced PC performance, and the second is during normal PC performance:








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Yes, and I'll try that next. The only thing is my problem can be a little tricky to reproduce. The 100% disk usage comes in episodes of several minutes to an hour or two, but isn't present constantly.

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No malware found, unless you count two Windows processes being flagged by 1 out of 70 of the engines (which I assume is erroneous).

The process it names in the Disk graph tooltip is the same as the process at the top of the disk-sorted Task Manager column, no?

Looks like this tool has a lot of information that could potentially be useful for diagnosing weird behaviors from particular apps, but unfortunately it's mostly over my head.

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Correct. Anything involving handling or replacing hardware is going to have to be a very last resort. This machine doesn't even have an easy-access HDD door like my old one did. On top of that, I'm currently living in a hostel in Panama, where most stores are closed and ordering anything internationally takes two to three weeks.

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Thanks! These both sound pretty involved a little over my head, but maybe I'll get to that point.

 

Need help narrowing down cause of 100% disk use

Okay, still there? Let's try this.

Good to know, and that may be the case some of the time. But the reason I'm spending my precious time to figure this out is that I'm often experiencing dramatic degradation in performance. Slow response from apps, seconds- to minutes-long lockups, apps "whiting out" for a few minutes (not responding), Firefox waiting 10 minutes after launch to load anything but a blank white screen in any tab even though the little loading animation is moving.

Hm, good to know. Something to look into. Another thing that seems to always be running is Windows Defender, which the system doesn't allow me to kill.

Here are a few screenshots I've taken over the past week or two:






















The response time varies a lot. I've seen it go very briefly up into the thousands of milliseconds, though a more typical case is bouncing around in the 20s and 30s with regular spikes up to about 100 or 150.

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Hm...what should I make of this?





Disk check didn't find anything wrong.

 

Need help narrowing down cause of 100% disk use

Hi there!

I've been having problems with 100% disk use on my HP Pavilion Laptop for a long time (a year?), generally without seeing what I would imagine are high read/write rates. It's gradually gotten to the point where the machine is super slow from 100% disk use about half of the time, which as I'm sure you can imagine is very aggravating. It's an HDD, and the current OS version is Windows 10 Home Version 1909. I have only 8GB of RAM, but this happens even when I'm using only 60% of it or less.

I've read some of the other threads on this forum about similar issues, but I'm only moderately techy and a little bit confused about where to start. I'm too busy to just try every single random online "fix" for this symptom, and it seems like maybe people here could help me more efficiently get the bottom of it.

I'm attaching some screenshots from Resource Monitor to get started. Happy to provide other information as needed.









Any and all help very much appreciated!