Win 10 Laptop Hard drive always at 100%

This is my brother-in-law's laptop for school.

Intel i5-8250U
8GB RAM
1TB spinner disk

CPU very low- 0-10%
Memory steady at about 4GB

But the HDD is always at 100%, with nothing running, making it really slow.


Virtually brand new.
Scrubbed of all Dell factory bloatware performed
Nothing special in startup programs
Very clean- normally a machine like this runs just fine.


Ive disabled Windows search, doesnt help.
Disabled Windows MSE.
Performed all Windows updates, restarted multiple times.
Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware and Spybot scans
Rolled back Adobe Flash updates
Set to high performance mode
Disabled the superfetch service
Set virtual memory to1.5gb min, 12gb max

What other things can I do, besides flatten it and install a (long overdue) SSD?

open task manager and sort by drive usage see whats hitting the hdd. there has to be something running causing it. remove mb, sas and sb as they have background tasks.

Even better, once you open task manager, go to the performance tab, click open resource monitor at the bottom, open the Disk tab, then organize the Disk Activity section by Total (B/sec) and see which actual file(s) are being accessed.

Could be something defective going on with the drive itself, use Resource Monitor to see what's actually using the storage media, what processes, then go from there. On a clean installation of Windows 10 you can expect to see some extra disk activity for at least a day or two as it indexes the contents of the drive(s) but that shouldn't last more than a day or two. If something is causing constant use of the storage Resource Monitor should be able to show precisely what's doing it.

Was typing this post even as criccio posted effectively the same thing above.

Leave the laptop on for a while, check for all the available windows updates. I have seen this a lot recently and all of them have been doing background updates and eventually go back to normal use.

My guess is the HDD is about to go tits up, and your seeing are re-reads from error correction

Thanks for all the input.

criccio said:

Even better, once you open task manager, go to the performance tab, click open resource monitor at the bottom, open the Disk tab, then organize the Disk Activity section by Total (B/sec) and see which actual file(s) are being accessed.

Click to expand...

The #1 thing is "System" at 3,061,000 B/sec
Anything after that is negligible.

pendragon1 said:

open task manager and sort by drive usage see whats hitting the hdd. there has to be something running causing it. remove mb, sas and sb as they have background tasks.

Click to expand...

Absolutely nothing.
Top thing is "system" at 0.1MB/s

m_isom said:

Leave the laptop on for a while, check for all the available windows updates. I have seen this a lot recently and all of them have been doing background updates and eventually go back to normal use.

Click to expand...

Looks like April Windows 10 Update 1803 is stuck on 80% "Preparing To Install" .
Wasnt doing that before....

So now Im working with the Windows Update Troubleshooter, and its been stuck at "Starting the Bits service" for like an hour.
Ugh. Ima bout to just say screw this and start over with a LTSB installation.

if theres nothing on it run the recovery and do a clean install, should be an option.

Update-

Looks like the April update 1803 has been stuck or trying to prepare/install for the better part of 2 months, bringing the whole machine to its knees.

Really my first experience with some of the issues other folks hate about Windows 10....

Used the Update Troubleshooter tool to unfuck it.

Can you imagine a non-computer person trying to deal with this?

They'd take it to the clowns at OfficeMax or just buy a new machine because they think they don't have enough memory or something.

Atrocious.

upgraded my dual boot linux laptop twice today to latest fedora. was it perfect? no - there was a repository I had to disable so the first upgrade would proceed. nothing is perfect as it was created by humans. i expect things not to work.