@@Deontjie - Sysinternals is free. Microsoft bought the company almost 20 years ago and made the tools free to everyone. The main reason they're not included with the OS is because they're pretty specific to tech people, so they can be installed separately (like ADAC is) by those that need them without cluttering up the OS for the 99.9% of users that will never need them or know how to use them.
yes unless you find the setting for the page file and murder the page file in settings specially if you have enough ram and want your system to use ram not hard disk space for fake ram I don't care if you think you turned it off cause Microsoft is bad for turning shit back on in your system behind your back and page file will slow your system down by using the hard disk even an ssd is slower then ram so you get slow down from using it as ram instead of ram plus this wears out the ssd faster to boot this is Microsofts way of killing your computer faster then it should be killed by killing off your ssd why cause Microsoft hates you and is punishing you for having nice things
This is what used to drive me nuts, often a Windows computer is unusable for the first few minutes. Always glad to get back to my Linux machines. As soon as they boot and reach the desktop, they are ready to go.
@@fernando4885 I don't use Windows myself, but I do support a few friends who have Windows. I have been using Linux exclusively since 2002. I use a boot SSD for the OS and executables and also use a ten-disk Raid 6 HDD setup because I need lots of storage capacity as I do a lot of video capture and editing for various clients, and I like to keep their work for a few weeks in case they require any changes. Unfortunately, SSD's can't match HDD's in either storage capacity or cost.
Windows 8-10-11 all are quite heavy OSes there are tons of applications and services running in background so it takes time. However with SSDs especially m.2 it is just instant, i still block some of services and applications that i don't need with Shutup10++. Especially services which collect data and make my already quite bad internet worse, Linux has clear advantage there as it is far lighter OS but this also brings some security risks and comparability problems.
I concur with the SSD solution. My experience with the problem was terrible with a newer Dell. Nothing worked. Cloning the HDD to an NVME SSD was like magic. Computer became a rocket ship and never exhibited the problem again.
For every installation of Windows I disable prefetch, and superfetch. But windows changed the name of them so you have to search the web to see what the new names are so you can go into systems and turn them off. Also, I turn off all indexing. I don't need indexing when my disk drive is so fast that I can search for a file in just a few seconds. Especially if it's an SSD. Almost always when I am searching for file I already know pretty much where it is so I just search that area.
If you're not using an SSD, the time to boot and system stabilize will be much longer. Windows Defender wants to scan the entire system every time Windows is booted. I know, because I have upgraded several PCs to SSDs. Disconnecting the network connection can help too. You can use Windows Task manager to monitor the performance of the CPU, Network, RAM and Disk as well.
Modern HDD are so fast because they have upto 500mb cache. I only notice a difference between the HDD and SDD when loading certain games. For all other usage HDD is absolutely fine. Just be sure to align the partitions, which is a common pitfall that arose right about the time SSD started to appear
@@nowy5 Extinct?? Pfff.. Far from it. At 14TB my 2022 hdd will outlive your Chinese soldered flash chips by at least 5 years. I wont tell you how quickly I boot windows. You will never believe me so no point
I had this issue On a 2016 laptop, with a slow mechanical hard drive, running Win 10. This problem primarily occurs after booting the computer and Windows updates. Suggested solutions: Wait for the updates to complete; purchase an SSD; purchase new computer; or install Linux.
It's usually Windows Update and it's happening since Windows XP. If you have Internet access Windows checks for updates once a day a few minutes after bootup. This consume so much memory Windows will start to swap. If swap is on a mechanical hard disk your PC will most probably lock up until it's done with constant disk activity. Solution is more RAM and upgrade to SSD.
@@addydiesel6627 I know of a bogdown where you see memory usage gradually rise to gargantuan proportion, while the disk i/o is saturated. That's windows defender running some special routine to make sure any malware processes are confirmed dead or something like that. It would then suddenly release and all the mem would be freed up again. Windows XP had this problem most prominently. It was definitely not the disk those cases, I cannot judge your case of course. But if this sounds like what you have, then both an SSD and RAM upgrade are in order so you can reduce the swap file and run mainly from memory to save the SSD from rapidly wearing.
Don't forget the anti virus updates. Also your anti virus package may include continuous scanning which is often overkill - unless you're into the more dodgy parts of the Internet like dark web
Have had this problem some time ago but it now seams resolved, maybe as I have disabled a lot of to me useless functions in window. What does disturb me sometimes is of how phone and computer programs want all your information but do not actually need it. Have since got rid of lot of apps which has not degraded the functions I need. Thanks for this excellent wake up lecture.
Great video :) Not a silver bullet, but these tools are a first place to start when narrowing down a problem. Most are available as "Portable Applications" so you don't need to install them on your system. I keep my main diagnostic set in a dedicated directory on a storage drive. I also carry them around on a flash drive as part of my "Fix anything" kit. You can use a portable launch menu system like A-Suite to organize all of the applications in your flash drive if you prefer a GUI click and go way of doing things.
if it is an HDD (not SSD) it might also be that it is on its way to the bin, the heads might be constantly 'seeking'. sometimes a chkdsk /mbr repair can fix this. But first get SMART info and backup the drive before éxperimenting'
You should be more specific and tell people to look out for "seek errors" and "reallocated sector count". I saved my laptop because I noticed this early and cloned my drive before complete disaster
OR, your computer hasn't got enough memory to cope with everything it's being asked to do, so it's constantly writing to and reading from the Page File - an area of your hard drive that the computer uses as virtual memory when the _actual_ memory is not sufficient. And yeah, if there's a Windows update waiting then it *will* eat up memory, because hey ! Microsoft takes priority over what *you* want to do.
Han the problem on a newish Dell with 20GB of DDR4. Only one of many suggested fixes worked. Replace the HDD with an NVME SSD. Never had the problem again.
@@bills6093 20Gb memory ? How does that work, then ? You can have 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64Gb but there's no way to have 20 unless you fit 2 x 8Gb plus a 4Gb module, but then your computer will only work in single channel mode.
@@Kevin-mx1vi 16 + 4 = 20 every time. Dell 3070 9th gen Intel chip. Intel has FLEX MODE for it's memory system which allows odd sized memory sticks to run in dual channel mode up to the limit of the smaller module, then single channel thereafter. FLEX MODE has been around since 2004. So with 16 + 4 you will have dual channel for 8 gigs of the ram.
@@Kevin-mx1vi I'm sure AMD has a FLEX MODE equivalent, don't know what they call it. How did we end up with those two modules? The Dell originally had a single 4Gb stick. We ordered a second 4Gb stick to pair with it for dual channel 8 gigs. Dell sent us a 16Gb stick instead.
Nice tool indeed: I have used it successfully to find out where some apps are persisting their settings. I did not know the summary options, thank you! For identifying who is using my disk I prefer procmon, disk tab: sort by most active, then check the process box in top zone and see which files are being accessed below
I view this tool as a calming program. It allows me to verify that nothing untoward is going on that I should worry about. I like that MS Defender is protecting my system. I'd worry more if it were some random program that was communicating with something across the net. I'm willing to put up with all that disc access to keep my computer safe and running well. Thanks for the tutorial.
@@darrennew8211 Absolutely. Linux is great, but windows is still king of OSes simply due to the user-friendliness. We experts spit on wizards, but it's what makes it usable by 90% of all users, who are total n00bs. And that is why windows wins the sales race.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 I use Windows at home in spite of using Linux at work for 40 years. (I've also used probably a dozen other small and large OSes.) I still prefer the Windows UI to anything I've ever seen on any other platform, including the Mac.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 What is "wizards"? I almost never "use" windows, i.e. its user interface. I have it just because some programs demands it (like BankID). Almost for religious reasons it seems.
I’ve tried all of the standard “fixes” for Win 10 disc access issues with them to eventually fail. What I discovered is that if I boot my Win 10 computer with networking turned off. The computer boots quickly & once it’s stable in a few minutes I re-enable networking. The computer works normally & never slows down again unless I forget to disable networking before I turn it off. It’s kind of a nuisance but I’m no longer wasting a hour or so for my computer to respond to mouse or keyboard clicks.
That's wild. That feels like an issue either with your network controller (hardware), or perhaps the configuration. The latter might be addressed by reinstalling your network drivers, or perhaps refreshing Windows itself.
Pisses me off when waiting five minutes for Windows 10 computer to actually work. Another couple of minutes when I click on BBC website then open another window and a final total slowdown and stop if I dare to close a window or email etc!
To all reading, remember that windows 10 requires at least 8 GB of RAM to run well, and 16 to run better and even 32 to run great. anything less than 16 nowadays will have win10 swapping pretty quickly. In all fairness I upgraded my system to 8GB ram in 2007 when Vista was about to be released and the norm was 0.5 - 1.0 GB..
There's another thing that causes sometimes hyperactivity of disks...the indexing! I turn that off since it was available. Thanks for that hint with sysinternals!👍
Indexing is a leftover from the time when disks were not so fast.. Apart from that it is a good idea to store your files in a structured way. Remember; information is something you can easily retrieve. If not: it is just data that you obviously do not care about...
Feels like being sent back to 2010. Good old times when we felt like heroes using sysinternals and having to deal with magnetic hdd's. Guess the last time I had to run those tools to analyze a problem was around 2017 in my job as a enterprise business support engineer. Thanks for the memories, but seems a little late.
HDDs are still preffered by many as the storage price per TB is way lower still than SSDs and they can handle way more write cycles than an SSD. I still have 8 HDDs in my system, beside the 2 SSDs used for booting respectively windows and linux.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 I got rid of all of them, beside the backup-system, there is no way around hdd's there. The 12GB drives in my storage system are really great. But for gaming and even for working with photos a SSD is so much better, even a slower one like a crucial 500, this was worth the money.
There are plenty of Web sites and U Tube videos about reducing Windows bloat. Even better, back up your data, and do a clean installation using the debloat tips and tricks. Then of course, almost any desktop can [be adapted to] use a Solid State Drive or the newer NVME drive. For laptops, some older ones can't. These faster drives finish background tasks quicker.
I am glad I ran across this site, as I know nothing about windows. I run another system. My wife suffers through windows with the same stoicism she shows for all technology. How do you people do it?
Leo is a legend. Unfortunately it appears that google search is dead, and thus I must move onto other plaftforms like youtube. Google used to give you a list of matches including technical articles and forums. Now it gives you irrelevent ad sponsored junk "journalist" filler garbage and AI overviews based on irrelevant articles.
I disagree that this is the first step to take. No response from mouse, in combination with no ability to change from program to program (processes or programs) indicates that a system driver that is operating at a high ring level (at critical priority) is blocking the kernel from processing mouse messages. You might also find that the keyboard keys stop responding at some point and you get a beeps when you try to move the mouse or press any keys. Drive and drive controller drivers run as critical processes and if the hardware is failing the system has to wait. Some viruses also install themselves as critical system processes, but that's not the first place to look. First, make sure you aren't booting Windows 10 or later on a spinning hard drive. Your boot drive MUST be a SATA SSD or M.2 SATA/Mvme to use any recent Windows 10 version. Ignore what MS minimum requirements say for Windows 10. If you are using a spinning drive as your boot drive you won't have a usable computer, you will have a door stop. I've seen Windows 10 feature updates take an entire day to install on a spinning hard drive. And tanking the PC while it performs the update. If you are using a spinning drive, get it upgraded to an SSD otherwise you will have recurring problems over and over again. Next, make sure the disk isn't failing. Download and run SeaTools to check the drive's health. Check the event viewer for disk errors. Errors, especially disk errors in the swap file, will cause this behavior. If you can't get event viewer to open and you can't get SeaTools to run, then you have to use a Linux distro that will boot directly from CD/DVD//USB with the Linux versions of these tools in order check the main hard drive. If the drive is failing, you have the culprit. Open the computer and check the drives connections to the main board. If they are fine, and the drive still fails, then you have to remove the drive and check it from another PC. That will tell you if you need to replace the drive. Drive failure can also occur if your power supply isn't providing enough of the right voltage. This can occur, for example, if you recently installed a new GPU and it needs more power than your power supply can handle. A power issue can seem to be drive errors. Many systems have a power info page in the BIOS that shows voltages. Anything more than that for tracking down power issues requires special tools that most people won't have. After it's known that the drive and controller and motherboard aren't the problem, and it's not a power problem, then look for blocking processes and viruses, etc. as you indicated.
I can vouch for power supply problems causing seemingly unrelated symptoms. My computer started randomly rebooting at increasing frequency, finally refusing to boot at all. Computer repair perfume found no motherboard issues, but a failing power supply.
Another cause is inadequate memory leading to paging. If you don't have the problem frequently and only notice it occasionally, chances are it's just paging. At which point looking at what process and what file is most active will give you the answer, if you can get to it.
@@darrennew8211 So, yes, paging can cause slow response. Paging would prevent any mouse clicks from being able to activate a new window, move a window, etc. but it would not make the mouse fail to work completely as was implied by the question in the video, UNLESS a higher priority process, such as the disk failing to use the paging file, is the root cause. I have seen a read/write disk error that happens to be in the paging file cause similar behavior. But not simply because of low memory. If the drive isn't in a cascade failure (which can happen with a spinning disk head crash causing debris in the drive continuing to damage more areas, or an SSD and end of write cycle life), you can fix it temporarily by booting to a WinPE recovery environment and running chkdsk /r, followed by booting to safe mode and deleting the paging file, then rebooting to safe mode and recreating the paging file. Of course assuming there are no power or other hardware problems.
@@LarsV62 Wonky caps on the motherboard (or in the PSU) can also cause severe issues with power stability. Although this was more a problem of years past, and not so much now.
maybe gone are the days where we'd obsess over having a sparse set of processes... i got 65 running and 2 of them are google crash handler, and i don't even run chrome
I think the original question has nothing to do with what is explained in this video. No response from the disk, no response from windows, no disk activity in task manager, but the disk led is on? That smells like an error on the disk itself. It is probably trying to read/write data and it’s not working. The disk controller is trying to fix that and refuses any other work. Check SMART and it will probably show something in yellow, probably the unreadable sectors. Move your data to another disk as soon as possible. Obviously I’m talking about hard drives. I don’t know how SSD’s behave when they “go bad” because that has never happened yet with my SSD’s.
You are talking about "end of life" hard drives. This is a very niche topic and is only relevant for drives that are > 10 years old (WD) or less for other manufacturers
Seems like a lot of Microsoft OS releases are beta tests with flaws. If they do finally get it right, like XP or Win 7 then they have to muck things up again with a new version. Oh, and your old programs and hardware are no longer compatible.
I laugh at Windows’ claim of faster boot times than previous versions. Sure, the desktop shows up pretty quick… but you can’t actually DO anything until all the background apps and TSRs finish loading. At least 7 & XP we’re honest about their boot times.
This is brilliant Leo I just built a new machine with Windows 10 and an M2 C drive. My blue LED hard drive light flashes from time to time all day., Not a lot but enough to make me wonder what it it is. There was no sign in Task Manager. So this tool will help me find it. I Like many others - I just want to know
You have to set up your hdd in Bios as IDE, instead of Sata. That stops disk activity, and you can spin down your hdd if you want to. Interesting, if you connect your pc to ups, after some usage on battery, your pc will turn on gentle spin up, and the motor brake on all hdds. Also, ups turns on passive cooling, on some computers fan is not needed.
@@addydiesel6627What you described is a specific situation that most people do not have and thus these recommendations are moot. SATA has way more power saving options than the older ATA/IDE protocols. There should be options in windows to set the spin down idle interval. this can be anything from 1 minute to several hours. But the preffered setting in BIOS should be AHCI, as this supports the highest speeds and newest command set, including NCQ.
I got a likewise question. Using shotcut to export a video of an hour. Mix two or three video channels and one or two audios. It might take 4 hours or even 7 hours (!) on a fast windows machine. But why is there an enormous ethernet activity? Is big brother checking the export?
When I start my laptop I open task manager and wait until my hard drive drops down below 5 %. I have had some friends start their computers and do a software update at the same time and that throws a massive monkey wrench into the system. It is better to wait until all of the programs etc. are loaded into the memory and then do the update. I also delete temporary files and that helps to speed things up.
I wish I would have watched this a week ago. My mother asked me to look at her Acer laptop, it was a little more than a year old, but it had a half a terabyte spinning drive in it. The disk activity was stuck at 100%, it didn't matter what I did. I went through task manager shutting down and killing procceses, and if I could get it to settle down, it would start up again moments later. I ended up pulling the drive and putting an SSD in it, then fresh install windows.
I suspect Windows Defender performing client side scanning of your personal files and data. I used to enjoy Windows many years ago, but now the scanning creeps me out. I'm really happy using Linux Mint desktop now, and my computer can still select Windows at boot time if I really have to use Windows for something.
In fact this disk activity is because Windows is garbage cobbled together over the years from a hotch-potch of code. Linux, Unix and MacOS don't have this problem because they were written from scratch by people who knew what they were doing, rather than rushing junk out of the door and not caring much about the consequences. For much the same reason there are a lot of security problems on windows that just don't exist on the unix variants.
The problem is, Windows is always bogging the system down when you're in a hurry to get something done. That's my experience. It should prioritize the user's activities, but it doesn't.
I had this problem recently, after hours pulling hair and digging for reason it turned out that the disk had run out of "free reserved sectors" even though it had 1.6TB free space. I managed to solve it with scandisk and defragmentation. The clue was that the disk had constant 100% use but 0.0 bytes was written or read.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Unrelated in this case, but if you have a system with only SSDs, is no point having it turned on. But it does not matter in this case, because it was the scan disk that fixed some new reserved sectors.
After reading all the comments I am thankful I switched to a Mac. Used to spend 2 hrs a weeks maintaining my PC. After 12 years I’ve had few issues. But then again, I’m not a gamer, so the reason for having a PC is negligible.
I just had to reply, because before even watching the video, the answer that popped in my head was , because the manufacturers don't put enough RAM in the system!
I’ve had to physically delete the anti malware and defender off the os by force by destruction of the executable because it was doing 100% cpu or had mostly this was on laptops and an update had broken the program a program called wise force delete works well for deleting running system programs
what does it mean by 200 something else memory? that appeared on you tube at the top when I was listening to a channel what takes space in my disk ? thanks
Ah, windows and disks. I had Windows and Hackintosh on the same machine, actually on the same disk. After booting the system windows needed around 5 minutes to stop grinding the disk, even then it never stops making noise and keeping the led on. But Hakintosh was instantly ready to use and never grinds the disk or creating any noise, it does not keep disk led on all the time. Both OSs relatively fresh, Windows with only core services loaded at startup. Windows is a mess, both aesthetically and functionally. Which is a shame as there is no choice but going the Apple route which is often similarly idiotic.
Good info! The title made me think this was going to be an explanation for why all Windows computers have continuous hard drive activity, even when idle. For what purpose would Windows need to access the hard drive every few seconds, into infinity, even when you're not doing anything including accessing the drive in any way. I heard once that it is flushing the cache, but is that really necessary to do 37 trillion times in a row?
So I have to start the Process Monitor analysis before Windows goes bonkers, is that correct? I ask because sometimes my system is behaving just fine but will suddenly show a spinning cursor pointer that may last a few minutes before it calms down. I wish there was a keyboard combo that would stop the errant process but if I mess with the keyboard my screen grows pale with a WINDOWS NOT RESPONDING message.
Windows has grown in size and complexity to a level, where I have absolutelky no clue, what's actually going on 99.9% of the time. The fun part is that I actually like Windows. But - seriously - life is short. And I simply don't have the time to track down complex issues using complex monitors and process explorers. Imagine You're sitting in your car, and it behaves like that when You try to start the thing! My main PC is now running Debian. I would'nt say that it solved all my computer problems; other issues surfaced, but far less. I still have a couple of machines running Windows. Simply because not all programs have Linux counterparts.
It might be a problem with the HDD or maybe it's just too slow for Wndows.... Windows 10 doesn't work well with HDDs it needs SSD. Some hard drives when become older, before they brake, they become extremely slow. Also there are so called shingled drives (*also called SMR drives), they are abysmally slow at random read or write and should never be used to install an OS on them, they are good only for storage and even then they are slow. I have an SMR drive and I didn't know it was an SMR when I bought it, it's much more slower than my other HDD, both are used for storage, but the SMR drive is really slow, so I can imagine if someone installs Windows 10 on one of these drives, it would be extremely slow.
Thanks for advice, Leo! However... the culprit, in fact, is Microsoft. No matter which component of Windows does it. Even if you will be able to identify specific process, what will you do with it? Will you be able to kill it? Or significantly decrease its CPU/disk priority? It's this simple - last fast Windows system was XP. Anything newer really needs 8+ GBs of RAM and SSD. If you don't cut features from Windows significantly and cripple the system somehow, then there is no other way and Windows will be terribly slow system. If you have less featured computer, then you can only use Linux or BSD if you want your computer to be nice to use.
Ah! I use Process Monitor to copy my blu-rays so I can rip them and put them on my phone! If you set up the filter to "path" "contains" "mpls" then "include", it will show you what playlists your blu-ray player drive (you'll need a blu-ray drive on your computer and a software blu-ray player of course) is actually accessing when the movie is playing. This can be important in certain copy protection schemes that try to hide the true playlist, or have dozens of false playlists on the disc to confuse copying programs. Most of the time this is successful, but some very clever discs require another level of sleuth work...
Really interesting, and useful. My system shows a large number of events recorded for AVP.EXE, my anti-virus. I guess that's all OK, as I can hardly turn that off. On the other hand I also see a lot of Acronis monitoring events, so I will have to see whether that's important to turn on, as I run my backups by schedule.
Kaspersky does continuous scanning which is overkill for most people and a perfect SSD /HDD killer . That's why I left them. Try to disable continuous scan or unauthorised update attempts
Does this assume HDDs or does this also apply to NVME SSDs? I have a PC that has a lot of constant activity on its NVME SSD, which is becoming very, very hot... like 70 or 75 degrees Celsius.
Modern HDD manufactured 2020 and later have a huge cache and boot windows at a very decent speed. HDD don't have any of the SSD issues like heat, write limits, Capacity limit. Just try a 7200rpm 16TB WD with 500mb cache. You can get on offer for around 300 dollars 😀
Anyone know how to slow down the refresh rate of the "Browser task manager" in Edge and Chrome? I often need to know which tabs are using the most CPU, but the display quickly jumps all over the place, not letting me see the particulars at any instant. I thought Google was full of highly intelligent programmers...
@@askleonotenboom When sorting by CPU usage, the display updates too fast. The lines at top get replaced so quickly, I can't see the needed info in them in time. Need to lower the refresh rate to a user-set number of seconds, not once or twice a second. Plus, a pause button may help. But this situation has existed for so long, and my well-worded feedback to the giant software companies on this and other issues falls on deaf ears, I don't know what to do. Oddly enough, the smaller software producers with less funds actually respond and thank me and implement changes lol. More money, less service; less money, more service?
I'm puzzled by external hard drives being accessed when there shouldn't be any activity at all on them. I can understand Windows crap accessing C:, but why would drive H: be accessed when I'm not even sitting at the computer. There are no video downloads going on or any other activity that I might have started.
Ok I think it's safe to say it's always Windows Defender is the culprit here so how exactly do we deal with that, then? Is there a way to slow its roll without completely disabling it or the only two options here are 'disable' and 'constant disk access'?
The person is probably swapping. Windows Defender specifically accesses files at a lower priority so it doesn't block your use of the disk. In this video, it was Defender accessing the disk, but you'll notice the machine had no problem keeping up with the user.
Because since windows XP M$ constantly is running crap behind your back. It gets worse if you enable the Screensaver even from a fresh install task schedular gets to fire off all its defaults once it activates. You have to go through a ton of crap disabling services VIA the registry now since M$ has gone out of their way to LOCK your ability to disable many of these services via the Service manager since windows 8. Not to mention you need to spend alot of time in Task scheduler disabling the things it automatically will bring back. M$ sucks All I want from their OS is to launch Programs I don;t want the O$ doing a damn thing, I want it to be as metal as Win2000 once was. It's not the OS's JOB to do anything but launch programs I choose. I hope M$ tanks after Win12 launch, more and more crap is getting linux Ports thanks to Steam. Eventually the gaming community may even be able to switch over, and they have STRONG influence over the casual market. Able to direct the choices of novices\light computer users since they often seek their advice.
Good post. 90% of computer users lost you after 2 mins. It'd be a pain for me to get then have to take the command line code and determine what the program is doing. It would be more useful to a far larger user group if say you could ID the top 10 disk users in a say new Windows 11 system, an old one, a windows 10 system. In normal operation. If there is any real alt to this. Like yeah you can shut off defender, but leave yourself open, not an option. I'm not sure there are many who could make it thru the instructions far enough to determine what their issue is, but it might be the only way they can determine if it's a issue they just need to leave, if it's normal, etc..
Spin disks have terrible performance in Windows 10 (and presumably 11). Spin disks work great in Windows 7. What changed? Sloppy programming. Windows 10 starts about 60 antivirus scan threads simultaneously WITH a similar number of threads building the search index. SSD's don't really care about that so with an SSD you don't need any fancy scheduling or queue re-ordering. If I reboot my Windows 10 computer, I can FORGET doing ANYTHING for the next HOUR. For the next two hours after that it is going to be sluggish. So about that SSD. They tend to fail *abruptly* so I would never keep vital data on SSD. Unfortunately, computer performance is now horrible without it. Oh, what to do! Oh, easy, stick with Windows 7 a bit longer.
Good advice. I'd add, always put in 2 large NVME drives, 1 TB or larger, and keep a "backup" file on both. Doesn't hurt to buy one of those external drives to triplicate. It's not expensive and will eventually save you.
@@floycewhite6991 My archives are on NAS; network attached storage. 4 disks of 6 TB each in RAID 5; and an offsite copy. I fire up the NAS only occasionally to copy things to it and then turn it off. That way it isn't even online in case my computer gets a cryptovirus or something. An EMP will wipe out all SSD and Flash storage instantly. And I mean about one nanosecond. Flash depends on embedded electrons to maintain state (1 or 0) and a high energy pulse will simply reset the entire chip to 1's or 0's depending on what is a lack-of-charge. A nearby lightning strike might have similar effect. Spin disks ignore electric field BUT obviously are sensitive to magnetic field. However most spin disks are somewhat or strongly magnetically shielded; after all, the magnets in the actuator are incredibly strong. I have disassembled many disks to erase the contents but I keep the magnets. They are much too powerful to be used as refrigerator magnets. Spin disks tend to give warning before failing. I've managed to recover everything even from rather substantially damaged disks that won't boot. They need to spin of course.
No. I disagree. HDD have excellent performance in win 10 and probably w11. You need: 1) a modern HDD with 500mb cache 2) to be able to format optimally (sector size 3) alignment with special software But most people don't know how
@@addydiesel6627This is likely related to my computer at work. It's HDD performance is terrible but in every other way the computer is superior; a Dell workstation with 6 core Xeon processor and four channels of ECC memory totaling 32 gigabytes of RAM. It permits an astonishing number of threads to concurrently make disk requests, queue length sometimes around 100 outstanding requests and latency over 1000 ms. It was even worse before I turned off OneDrive. Applications time out and fail. In other words, it is unbalanced and the HDD is the bottleneck. I do suspect a problem with the HDD or controller, it ought not to be THAT bad.
I think if I were still using mechanical disks, I would not want to throw an ssd at the problem right off the bat. I feel this is a mistake too often made-- throwing new hardware at a software problem. I'd want to know what's causing the constant disk thrashing and why. I'm not going to immediately run to nix or an ssd solution. To me, that's just giving up before you've started. If Defender was to blame, I'd be some kind of p**sed. I wouldn't want my av acting like malware in its own right. I'd go to the nearest MS help forum and looksee who else might have the problem, and if they found a fix. Also, I feel that Windows is too essential to dump it for a distro of nix whenever I get mad at the OS.
I use Linux that tells me the initiation of activity. Windows browsing the net is forced from outside to constantly report detailed of Your activity and what Your harddisc contains to the provider, to Microsoft and to the server of the web-side You're on. What did You expect? All this "telling" and the advertising is the most of Your traffic - just a few % is what You think you're doing.
Yes. You can set Defender to not run at all, or to run only a "quick scan" on startup. You can do a full scan once a month or so whenever you finish using the computer and plan to be home for several hours (overnight).
It's probably just reading, not writing. Reading doesn't hurt. Writing hurts a bit but there are algorithms in the drive that spread the writing evenly over the complete drive. I mean it's not always writing at the same physical location when for example you keep on overwriting the same file over and over again.
The problem is that Windows is huge. It is so big that it takes a long time to load things from disk. The problem with totally insecure operating systems (like Microsoft Windows) is that they have to scan very often for viruses. A secure operating system does not have that need, because the system itself does not catch viruses. The solution is to use a system that is much more optimized and secure, like any GNU/Linux distribution.
Windows put in its fast start feature -- that is, never actually turn off the computer -- to get around startup slowness. Wouldn't you know SSDs and then NVME drives got so cheap "fast start" was no longer necessary.
If moores law is correct, eventually data density improvement on HDD will allow them to overtake SSD. Especially as SSD will only get faster if they get hotter and hotter
Each solution is going to be different. "My car won't start." "Here's how you figure out which part is broken." "Why don't you tell me what's broken on *my* car?"
@@darrennew8211 Well, it's a very commonly reported problem and the commonly reported solution that works is to switch to an SSD. It's good advice in any case, if you still have your OS on a hard disk. And it's cheap.
Windows 10 does this all the time!!! I’m sick and tired of people saying the usual, “You need more RAM… it’s paging” I HAVE 32 GB OF RAM!!!! How much RAM does Windows need??? Also, I don’t understand people saying, “It does this for about 5 - 10 minutes after I boot up before I can use it” My Windows 10 PC sometimes does this for HOURS AT A TIME and is becomes basically useless.
While that's hyperbole, it does update often (the anti-malware database updates at least daily). But then ... my Linux boxes get updates almost every day it seems as well.
@@askleonotenboomyes, but it only takes a Linux desktop a few seconds to apply updates and you don't need to reboot. I actually tested one day that I could update 3 Linux desktops, 1 Linux laptop and I think about 6 Linux VMS and containers in less time than it took one Windows laptop to do a standard Windows update. It's just beyond belief that people accept how slow and mid 90s Windows still is.
The reason you have constant disk activate in windows is because you did not throw away your old computer and get a solid state drive. Are you also having problems with your horse and buggy?
Why Do I Have Constant Disk Activity in Windows? Because it is busy spying on you.... The question is, why are you using Windows? Oh, that's right, you need to play games.....lol
If you’re not doing it, who is?
So Microshit slows down your system so you must buy the monitor?
@@Deontjie - Sysinternals is free. Microsoft bought the company almost 20 years ago and made the tools free to everyone. The main reason they're not included with the OS is because they're pretty specific to tech people, so they can be installed separately (like ADAC is) by those that need them without cluttering up the OS for the 99.9% of users that will never need them or know how to use them.
yes unless you find the setting for the page file and murder the page file in settings specially if you have enough ram and want your system to use ram not hard disk space for fake ram I don't care if you think you turned it off cause Microsoft is bad for turning shit back on in your system behind your back and page file will slow your system down by using the hard disk even an ssd is slower then ram so you get slow down from using it as ram instead of ram plus this wears out the ssd faster to boot this is Microsofts way of killing your computer faster then it should be killed by killing off your ssd why cause Microsoft hates you and is punishing you for having nice things
@@someoneoncesaid6978 I was about to say that procmon is free I have used it and other stuff for years, there are bucket loads of free stuff for win.
I've been asking this question for DECADES. "What is my computer doing?! Why is it so busy?!" Sometimes I can find out and sometimes I can't.
This is what used to drive me nuts, often a Windows computer is unusable for the first few minutes. Always glad to get back to my Linux machines. As soon as they boot and reach the desktop, they are ready to go.
This drove me also to Linux, at least for my private computer.
Just use an SSD
@@fernando4885 I don't use Windows myself, but I do support a few friends who have Windows. I have been using Linux exclusively since 2002. I use a boot SSD for the OS and executables and also use a ten-disk Raid 6 HDD setup because I need lots of storage capacity as I do a lot of video capture and editing for various clients, and I like to keep their work for a few weeks in case they require any changes. Unfortunately, SSD's can't match HDD's in either storage capacity or cost.
Windows 8-10-11 all are quite heavy OSes there are tons of applications and services running in background so it takes time. However with SSDs especially m.2 it is just instant, i still block some of services and applications that i don't need with Shutup10++. Especially services which collect data and make my already quite bad internet worse, Linux has clear advantage there as it is far lighter OS but this also brings some security risks and comparability problems.
I concur with the SSD solution. My experience with the problem was terrible with a newer Dell. Nothing worked. Cloning the HDD to an NVME SSD was like magic. Computer became a rocket ship and never exhibited the problem again.
For every installation of Windows I disable prefetch, and superfetch. But windows changed the name of them so you have to search the web to see what the new names are so you can go into systems and turn them off.
Also, I turn off all indexing. I don't need indexing when my disk drive is so fast that I can search for a file in just a few seconds. Especially if it's an SSD. Almost always when I am searching for file I already know pretty much where it is so I just search that area.
Indexing is a horrible consumer of CPU.
Turn off OneDrive and Phone Link too?
Great advice. Same here. Prefetch/supfetch/indexing off. But don't forget your AV may continuously scan (reason why I abandoned kaspersky)
@@Chris.Brisson I always do that on any installation and then check it hasn't been turned on by a Windows update.
If you're not using an SSD, the time to boot and system stabilize will be much longer. Windows Defender wants to scan the entire system every time Windows is booted. I know, because I have upgraded several PCs to SSDs. Disconnecting the network connection can help too. You can use Windows Task manager to monitor the performance of the CPU, Network, RAM and Disk as well.
Done with Microsoft windows, please assist me with asisted ending my life, Microsoft is very cruel, is a epsteining a start 😢😢😢😢
Modern HDD are so fast because they have upto 500mb cache. I only notice a difference between the HDD and SDD when loading certain games. For all other usage HDD is absolutely fine. Just be sure to align the partitions, which is a common pitfall that arose right about the time SSD started to appear
@@addydiesel6627 Modern HDD? It is a product in his way to extinct.
@@nowy5 Extinct?? Pfff.. Far from it. At 14TB my 2022 hdd will outlive your Chinese soldered flash chips by at least 5 years. I wont tell you how quickly I boot windows. You will never believe me so no point
@@addydiesel6627 What would you ever need 14TB for?
6:21 - One of the most valuable TH-cam videos I've seen in a long time...
I had this issue On a 2016 laptop, with a slow mechanical hard drive, running Win 10. This problem primarily occurs after booting the computer and Windows updates.
Suggested solutions: Wait for the updates to complete; purchase an SSD; purchase new computer; or install Linux.
It's usually Windows Update and it's happening since Windows XP. If you have Internet access Windows checks for updates once a day a few minutes after bootup. This consume so much memory Windows will start to swap. If swap is on a mechanical hard disk your PC will most probably lock up until it's done with constant disk activity. Solution is more RAM and upgrade to SSD.
Since upgrading to SSD my lockups still happen because of wear levelling and caching
@@addydiesel6627 I know of a bogdown where you see memory usage gradually rise to gargantuan proportion, while the disk i/o is saturated. That's windows defender running some special routine to make sure any malware processes are confirmed dead or something like that. It would then suddenly release and all the mem would be freed up again. Windows XP had this problem most prominently. It was definitely not the disk those cases, I cannot judge your case of course. But if this sounds like what you have, then both an SSD and RAM upgrade are in order so you can reduce the swap file and run mainly from memory to save the SSD from rapidly wearing.
Don't forget the anti virus updates. Also your anti virus package may include continuous scanning which is often overkill - unless you're into the more dodgy parts of the Internet like dark web
Have had this problem some time ago but it now seams resolved, maybe as I have disabled a lot of to me useless functions in window. What does disturb me sometimes is of how phone and computer programs want all your information but do not actually need it. Have since got rid of lot of apps which has not degraded the functions I need. Thanks for this excellent wake up lecture.
Great video :)
Not a silver bullet, but these tools are a first place to start when narrowing down a problem. Most are available as "Portable Applications" so you don't need to install them on your system. I keep my main diagnostic set in a dedicated directory on a storage drive. I also carry them around on a flash drive as part of my "Fix anything" kit. You can use a portable launch menu system like A-Suite to organize all of the applications in your flash drive if you prefer a GUI click and go way of doing things.
Well done, Leo. Your narrative style is much to my liking.
if it is an HDD (not SSD) it might also be that it is on its way to the bin, the heads might be constantly 'seeking'. sometimes a chkdsk /mbr repair can fix this. But first get SMART info and backup the drive before éxperimenting'
You should be more specific and tell people to look out for "seek errors" and "reallocated sector count". I saved my laptop because I noticed this early and cloned my drive before complete disaster
CrystalDiskInfo might help...
OR, your computer hasn't got enough memory to cope with everything it's being asked to do, so it's constantly writing to and reading from the Page File - an area of your hard drive that the computer uses as virtual memory when the _actual_ memory is not sufficient.
And yeah, if there's a Windows update waiting then it *will* eat up memory, because hey ! Microsoft takes priority over what *you* want to do.
Han the problem on a newish Dell with 20GB of DDR4. Only one of many suggested fixes worked. Replace the HDD with an NVME SSD. Never had the problem again.
@@bills6093 20Gb memory ? How does that work, then ? You can have 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64Gb but there's no way to have 20 unless you fit 2 x 8Gb plus a 4Gb module, but then your computer will only work in single channel mode.
@@Kevin-mx1vi 16 + 4 = 20 every time. Dell 3070 9th gen Intel chip. Intel has FLEX MODE for it's memory system which allows odd sized memory sticks to run in dual channel mode up to the limit of the smaller module, then single channel thereafter. FLEX MODE has been around since 2004. So with 16 + 4 you will have dual channel for 8 gigs of the ram.
@@Kevin-mx1vi I'm sure AMD has a FLEX MODE equivalent, don't know what they call it. How did we end up with those two modules? The Dell originally had a single 4Gb stick. We ordered a second 4Gb stick to pair with it for dual channel 8 gigs. Dell sent us a 16Gb stick instead.
@@bills6093 And the other 12Gb is single channel so the computer has to juggle 2 different speeds of memory. Welcome to slow computing.
Nice tool indeed: I have used it successfully to find out where some apps are persisting their settings. I did not know the summary options, thank you!
For identifying who is using my disk I prefer procmon, disk tab: sort by most active, then check the process box in top zone and see which files are being accessed below
Thanks, Leo! I've had this problem on many computers; now I know how to figure out what's causing it.
I view this tool as a calming program. It allows me to verify that nothing untoward is going on that I should worry about. I like that MS Defender is protecting my system. I'd worry more if it were some random program that was communicating with something across the net. I'm willing to put up with all that disc access to keep my computer safe and running well. Thanks for the tutorial.
This is one of a legion of issues leading some of us to consider Windoze to be malware.
An SSD seems to completely cure it.
I'm pretty sure Linux and MacOS will become unresponsive when it's page swapping too.
@@darrennew8211 Absolutely. Linux is great, but windows is still king of OSes simply due to the user-friendliness. We experts spit on wizards, but it's what makes it usable by 90% of all users, who are total n00bs. And that is why windows wins the sales race.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 I use Windows at home in spite of using Linux at work for 40 years. (I've also used probably a dozen other small and large OSes.) I still prefer the Windows UI to anything I've ever seen on any other platform, including the Mac.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 What is "wizards"? I almost never "use" windows, i.e. its user interface. I have it just because some programs demands it (like BankID). Almost for religious reasons it seems.
I’ve tried all of the standard “fixes” for Win 10 disc access issues with them to eventually fail. What I discovered is that if I boot my Win 10 computer with networking turned off. The computer boots quickly & once it’s stable in a few minutes I re-enable networking. The computer works normally & never slows down again unless I forget to disable networking before I turn it off. It’s kind of a nuisance but I’m no longer wasting a hour or so for my computer to respond to mouse or keyboard clicks.
That's wild. That feels like an issue either with your network controller (hardware), or perhaps the configuration. The latter might be addressed by reinstalling your network drivers, or perhaps refreshing Windows itself.
Pisses me off when waiting five minutes for Windows 10 computer to actually work. Another couple of minutes when I click on BBC website then open another window and a final total slowdown and stop if I dare to close a window or email etc!
@@fabianmckenna8197 You need more RAM. You're probably paging.
@@askleonotenboom or try it with a usb network adapter, to see if hardware is potentially the problem.
To all reading, remember that windows 10 requires at least 8 GB of RAM to run well, and 16 to run better and even 32 to run great. anything less than 16 nowadays will have win10 swapping pretty quickly. In all fairness I upgraded my system to 8GB ram in 2007 when Vista was about to be released and the norm was 0.5 - 1.0 GB..
There's another thing that causes sometimes hyperactivity of disks...the indexing! I turn that off since it was available.
Thanks for that hint with sysinternals!👍
Indexing is a leftover from the time when disks were not so fast.. Apart from that it is a good idea to store your files in a structured way.
Remember; information is something you can easily retrieve. If not: it is just data that you obviously do not care about...
Feels like being sent back to 2010. Good old times when we felt like heroes using sysinternals and having to deal with magnetic hdd's. Guess the last time I had to run those tools to analyze a problem was around 2017 in my job as a enterprise business support engineer. Thanks for the memories, but seems a little late.
HDDs are still preffered by many as the storage price per TB is way lower still than SSDs and they can handle way more write cycles than an SSD. I still have 8 HDDs in my system, beside the 2 SSDs used for booting respectively windows and linux.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 I got rid of all of them, beside the backup-system, there is no way around hdd's there. The 12GB drives in my storage system are really great. But for gaming and even for working with photos a SSD is so much better, even a slower one like a crucial 500, this was worth the money.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334Makes sense !
There are plenty of Web sites and U Tube videos about reducing Windows bloat. Even better, back up your data, and do a clean installation using the debloat tips and tricks. Then of course, almost any desktop can [be adapted to] use a Solid State Drive or the newer NVME drive. For laptops, some older ones can't. These faster drives finish background tasks quicker.
My WIN 10 sometimes is very very slow. 99% of the time it is caused by Windows getting ready to run an update. After the update, all is well.
Similar situation here with Win-10. But, in my case, it is not near as slow as what you are experiencing, just slightly sluggish.
Upgrade ram
@@roijoo3946 I did.
@@roijoo3946 If you have a traditional HDD, an SSD will make your computer so much faster, you will be amazed.
Too many silly updates
I am glad I ran across this site, as I know nothing about windows. I run another system. My wife suffers through windows with the same stoicism she shows for all technology. How do you people do it?
Leo, th you. This is one of the most useful pieces of PC information I´ve received in a long time!!
Excellent video, concise, clear and informative.
Leo is a legend. Unfortunately it appears that google search is dead, and thus I must move onto other plaftforms like youtube. Google used to give you a list of matches including technical articles and forums. Now it gives you irrelevent ad sponsored junk "journalist" filler garbage and AI overviews based on irrelevant articles.
I disagree that this is the first step to take. No response from mouse, in combination with no ability to change from program to program (processes or programs) indicates that a system driver that is operating at a high ring level (at critical priority) is blocking the kernel from processing mouse messages. You might also find that the keyboard keys stop responding at some point and you get a beeps when you try to move the mouse or press any keys. Drive and drive controller drivers run as critical processes and if the hardware is failing the system has to wait. Some viruses also install themselves as critical system processes, but that's not the first place to look.
First, make sure you aren't booting Windows 10 or later on a spinning hard drive. Your boot drive MUST be a SATA SSD or M.2 SATA/Mvme to use any recent Windows 10 version. Ignore what MS minimum requirements say for Windows 10. If you are using a spinning drive as your boot drive you won't have a usable computer, you will have a door stop. I've seen Windows 10 feature updates take an entire day to install on a spinning hard drive. And tanking the PC while it performs the update. If you are using a spinning drive, get it upgraded to an SSD otherwise you will have recurring problems over and over again.
Next, make sure the disk isn't failing. Download and run SeaTools to check the drive's health. Check the event viewer for disk errors. Errors, especially disk errors in the swap file, will cause this behavior. If you can't get event viewer to open and you can't get SeaTools to run, then you have to use a Linux distro that will boot directly from CD/DVD//USB with the Linux versions of these tools in order check the main hard drive. If the drive is failing, you have the culprit. Open the computer and check the drives connections to the main board. If they are fine, and the drive still fails, then you have to remove the drive and check it from another PC. That will tell you if you need to replace the drive.
Drive failure can also occur if your power supply isn't providing enough of the right voltage. This can occur, for example, if you recently installed a new GPU and it needs more power than your power supply can handle. A power issue can seem to be drive errors. Many systems have a power info page in the BIOS that shows voltages. Anything more than that for tracking down power issues requires special tools that most people won't have.
After it's known that the drive and controller and motherboard aren't the problem, and it's not a power problem, then look for blocking processes and viruses, etc. as you indicated.
I can vouch for power supply problems causing seemingly unrelated symptoms.
My computer started randomly rebooting at increasing frequency, finally refusing to boot at all. Computer repair perfume found no motherboard issues, but a failing power supply.
Another cause is inadequate memory leading to paging. If you don't have the problem frequently and only notice it occasionally, chances are it's just paging. At which point looking at what process and what file is most active will give you the answer, if you can get to it.
@@darrennew8211 So, yes, paging can cause slow response. Paging would prevent any mouse clicks from being able to activate a new window, move a window, etc. but it would not make the mouse fail to work completely as was implied by the question in the video, UNLESS a higher priority process, such as the disk failing to use the paging file, is the root cause.
I have seen a read/write disk error that happens to be in the paging file cause similar behavior. But not simply because of low memory. If the drive isn't in a cascade failure (which can happen with a spinning disk head crash causing debris in the drive continuing to damage more areas, or an SSD and end of write cycle life), you can fix it temporarily by booting to a WinPE recovery environment and running chkdsk /r, followed by booting to safe mode and deleting the paging file, then rebooting to safe mode and recreating the paging file. Of course assuming there are no power or other hardware problems.
Bloody software gurus eh, as soon as there's a speed breakthrough the devs come in and rape the new possibilities 🤣
@@LarsV62 Wonky caps on the motherboard (or in the PSU) can also cause severe issues with power stability. Although this was more a problem of years past, and not so much now.
maybe gone are the days where we'd obsess over having a sparse set of processes... i got 65 running and 2 of them are google crash handler, and i don't even run chrome
I think the original question has nothing to do with what is explained in this video. No response from the disk, no response from windows, no disk activity in task manager, but the disk led is on? That smells like an error on the disk itself. It is probably trying to read/write data and it’s not working. The disk controller is trying to fix that and refuses any other work. Check SMART and it will probably show something in yellow, probably the unreadable sectors. Move your data to another disk as soon as possible. Obviously I’m talking about hard drives. I don’t know how SSD’s behave when they “go bad” because that has never happened yet with my SSD’s.
You are talking about "end of life" hard drives. This is a very niche topic and is only relevant for drives that are > 10 years old (WD) or less for other manufacturers
You all must have the "patience of saints" I gave up on Windows in 2008 because of this. Nice to see things have changed (Ubuntu Linux)
Windows 10 does not support Start menu folders for MSIX packages so the tools are not grouped in a Sysinternals Suite folder.
One of the most infuriating and incomprehensible downgrades of W10...
Seems like a lot of Microsoft OS releases are beta tests with flaws. If they do finally get it right, like XP or Win 7 then they have to muck things up again with a new version. Oh, and your old programs and hardware are no longer compatible.
I laugh at Windows’ claim of faster boot times than previous versions. Sure, the desktop shows up pretty quick… but you can’t actually DO anything until all the background apps and TSRs finish loading. At least 7 & XP we’re honest about their boot times.
They show a screenshot of the desktop first…..
They show a screenshot of the desktop first…..
THAT is actually a very useful thing I've never come across in all of my time of using a pc before. Thank you for this invaluable info, Mr. Notenboom!
This is brilliant Leo
I just built a new machine with Windows 10 and an M2 C drive.
My blue LED hard drive light flashes from time to time all day., Not a lot but enough to make me wonder what it it is.
There was no sign in Task Manager.
So this tool will help me find it.
I Like many others - I just want to know
Excellent explanation!
You have to set up your hdd in Bios as IDE, instead of Sata. That stops disk activity, and you can spin down your hdd if you want to. Interesting, if you connect your pc to ups, after some usage on battery, your pc will turn on gentle spin up, and the motor brake on all hdds. Also, ups turns on passive cooling, on some computers fan is not needed.
Even better to use Disk Management to set your hdd to "Offline".
@@Chris.Brisson serious?
Where is the option? 🤔 And why doesn't sata allow spin down?
@@addydiesel6627What you described is a specific situation that most people do not have and thus these recommendations are moot.
SATA has way more power saving options than the older ATA/IDE protocols. There should be options in windows to set the spin down idle interval. this can be anything from 1 minute to several hours. But the preffered setting in BIOS should be AHCI, as this supports the highest speeds and newest command set, including NCQ.
I got a likewise question. Using shotcut to export a video of an hour. Mix two or three video channels and one or two audios. It might take 4 hours or even 7 hours (!) on a fast windows machine. But why is there an enormous ethernet activity? Is big brother checking the export?
What usually maxes out my HD is search indexing and OneDrive / SharePoint syncing.
When I start my laptop I open task manager and wait until my hard drive drops down below 5 %. I have had some friends start their computers and do a software update at the same time and that throws a massive monkey wrench into the system. It is better to wait until all of the programs etc. are loaded into the memory and then do the update. I also delete temporary files and that helps to speed things up.
I wish I would have watched this a week ago. My mother asked me to look at her Acer laptop, it was a little more than a year old, but it had a half a terabyte spinning drive in it. The disk activity was stuck at 100%, it didn't matter what I did. I went through task manager shutting down and killing procceses, and if I could get it to settle down, it would start up again moments later. I ended up pulling the drive and putting an SSD in it, then fresh install windows.
I suspect Windows Defender performing client side scanning of your personal files and data. I used to enjoy Windows many years ago, but now the scanning creeps me out. I'm really happy using Linux Mint desktop now, and my computer can still select Windows at boot time if I really have to use Windows for something.
Great tips! Thanks!
In fact this disk activity is because Windows is garbage cobbled together over the years from a hotch-potch of code. Linux, Unix and MacOS don't have this problem because they were written from scratch by people who knew what they were doing, rather than rushing junk out of the door and not caring much about the consequences. For much the same reason there are a lot of security problems on windows that just don't exist on the unix variants.
The problem is, Windows is always bogging the system down when you're in a hurry to get something done. That's my experience. It should prioritize the user's activities, but it doesn't.
I had this problem recently, after hours pulling hair and digging for reason it turned out that the disk had run out of "free reserved sectors" even though it had 1.6TB free space. I managed to solve it with scandisk and defragmentation.
The clue was that the disk had constant 100% use but 0.0 bytes was written or read.
WIndows has had automatic defrag since windows Vista. But it can be turned off, which is very unwise.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Unrelated in this case, but if you have a system with only SSDs, is no point having it turned on.
But it does not matter in this case, because it was the scan disk that fixed some new reserved sectors.
After reading all the comments I am thankful I switched to a Mac. Used to spend 2 hrs a weeks maintaining my PC. After 12 years I’ve had few issues. But then again, I’m not a gamer, so the reason for having a PC is negligible.
I just had to reply, because before even watching the video, the answer that popped in my head was , because the manufacturers don't put enough RAM in the system!
Very handy tool. Thanks for that 👍
I’ve had to physically delete the anti malware and defender off the os by force by destruction of the executable because it was doing 100% cpu or had mostly this was on laptops and an update had broken the program a program called wise force delete works well for deleting running system programs
what does it mean by 200 something else memory? that appeared on you tube at the top when I was listening to a channel what takes space in my disk ? thanks
Chek if the defrag is active / scheduled.
a solution is disable superfetch and prefetch that can solve the problem thats for mechanical hdds with ssd not needed
Ah, windows and disks. I had Windows and Hackintosh on the same machine, actually on the same disk. After booting the system windows needed around 5 minutes to stop grinding the disk, even then it never stops making noise and keeping the led on. But Hakintosh was instantly ready to use and never grinds the disk or creating any noise, it does not keep disk led on all the time. Both OSs relatively fresh, Windows with only core services loaded at startup.
Windows is a mess, both aesthetically and functionally. Which is a shame as there is no choice but going the Apple route which is often similarly idiotic.
Good info! The title made me think this was going to be an explanation for why all Windows computers have continuous hard drive activity, even when idle. For what purpose would Windows need to access the hard drive every few seconds, into infinity, even when you're not doing anything including accessing the drive in any way. I heard once that it is flushing the cache, but is that really necessary to do 37 trillion times in a row?
thanks man this is gong to be extremely useful. it however does not make a menu in win10
So I have to start the Process Monitor analysis before Windows goes bonkers, is that correct? I ask because sometimes my system is behaving just fine but will suddenly show a spinning cursor pointer that may last a few minutes before it calms down. I wish there was a keyboard combo that would stop the errant process but if I mess with the keyboard my screen grows pale with a WINDOWS NOT RESPONDING message.
Thank you! This should be most helpful!
Windows has grown in size and complexity to a level, where I have absolutelky no clue, what's actually going on 99.9% of the time. The fun part is that I actually like Windows. But - seriously - life is short. And I simply don't have the time to track down complex issues using complex monitors and process explorers. Imagine You're sitting in your car, and it behaves like that when You try to start the thing! My main PC is now running Debian. I would'nt say that it solved all my computer problems; other issues surfaced, but far less.
I still have a couple of machines running Windows. Simply because not all programs have Linux counterparts.
It might be a problem with the HDD or maybe it's just too slow for Wndows.... Windows 10 doesn't work well with HDDs it needs SSD. Some hard drives when become older, before they brake, they become extremely slow. Also there are so called shingled drives (*also called SMR drives), they are abysmally slow at random read or write and should never be used to install an OS on them, they are good only for storage and even then they are slow. I have an SMR drive and I didn't know it was an SMR when I bought it, it's much more slower than my other HDD, both are used for storage, but the SMR drive is really slow, so I can imagine if someone installs Windows 10 on one of these drives, it would be extremely slow.
Thanks for advice, Leo! However... the culprit, in fact, is Microsoft. No matter which component of Windows does it. Even if you will be able to identify specific process, what will you do with it? Will you be able to kill it? Or significantly decrease its CPU/disk priority? It's this simple - last fast Windows system was XP. Anything newer really needs 8+ GBs of RAM and SSD. If you don't cut features from Windows significantly and cripple the system somehow, then there is no other way and Windows will be terribly slow system. If you have less featured computer, then you can only use Linux or BSD if you want your computer to be nice to use.
Ah! I use Process Monitor to copy my blu-rays so I can rip them and put them on my phone! If you set up the filter to "path" "contains" "mpls" then "include", it will show you what playlists your blu-ray player drive (you'll need a blu-ray drive on your computer and a software blu-ray player of course) is actually accessing when the movie is playing. This can be important in certain copy protection schemes that try to hide the true playlist, or have dozens of false playlists on the disc to confuse copying programs. Most of the time this is successful, but some very clever discs require another level of sleuth work...
On older computers it's almost always windows update just destroying the spinning rust storage device with reads and writes.
Really interesting, and useful. My system shows a large number of events recorded for AVP.EXE, my anti-virus. I guess that's all OK, as I can hardly turn that off. On the other hand I also see a lot of Acronis monitoring events, so I will have to see whether that's important to turn on, as I run my backups by schedule.
Kaspersky does continuous scanning which is overkill for most people and a perfect SSD /HDD killer . That's why I left them. Try to disable continuous scan or unauthorised update attempts
Does this assume HDDs or does this also apply to NVME SSDs?
I have a PC that has a lot of constant activity on its NVME SSD, which is becoming very, very hot... like 70 or 75 degrees Celsius.
Modern HDD manufactured 2020 and later have a huge cache and boot windows at a very decent speed. HDD don't have any of the SSD issues like heat, write limits, Capacity limit. Just try a 7200rpm 16TB WD with 500mb cache. You can get on offer for around 300 dollars 😀
Anyone know how to slow down the refresh rate of the "Browser task manager" in Edge and Chrome? I often need to know which tabs are using the most CPU, but the display quickly jumps all over the place, not letting me see the particulars at any instant. I thought Google was full of highly intelligent programmers...
I assume you've clicked on the CPU header to sort by CPU usage. Then the most use should always be at the top.
@@askleonotenboom When sorting by CPU usage, the display updates too fast. The lines at top get replaced so quickly, I can't see the needed info in them in time. Need to lower the refresh rate to a user-set number of seconds, not once or twice a second. Plus, a pause button may help.
But this situation has existed for so long, and my well-worded feedback to the giant software companies on this and other issues falls on deaf ears, I don't know what to do. Oddly enough, the smaller software producers with less funds actually respond and thank me and implement changes lol. More money, less service; less money, more service?
@@rswow One approach might be to take a screen shot of the window. Just a thought/work-around. (That I've used elsewhere :-) )
I'm puzzled by external hard drives being accessed when there shouldn't be any activity at all on them. I can understand Windows crap accessing C:, but why would drive H: be accessed when I'm not even sitting at the computer. There are no video downloads going on or any other activity that I might have started.
Ok I think it's safe to say it's always Windows Defender is the culprit here so how exactly do we deal with that, then? Is there a way to slow its roll without completely disabling it or the only two options here are 'disable' and 'constant disk access'?
The person is probably swapping. Windows Defender specifically accesses files at a lower priority so it doesn't block your use of the disk. In this video, it was Defender accessing the disk, but you'll notice the machine had no problem keeping up with the user.
Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf
I installed linux mint on my computer. It boots in one and a half minutes. Doesn't have MS spyware or Google ware.
Because since windows XP M$ constantly is running crap behind your back. It gets worse if you enable the Screensaver even from a fresh install task schedular gets to fire off all its defaults once it activates. You have to go through a ton of crap disabling services VIA the registry now since M$ has gone out of their way to LOCK your ability to disable many of these services via the Service manager since windows 8. Not to mention you need to spend alot of time in Task scheduler disabling the things it automatically will bring back. M$ sucks All I want from their OS is to launch Programs I don;t want the O$ doing a damn thing, I want it to be as metal as Win2000 once was. It's not the OS's JOB to do anything but launch programs I choose. I hope M$ tanks after Win12 launch, more and more crap is getting linux Ports thanks to Steam. Eventually the gaming community may even be able to switch over, and they have STRONG influence over the casual market. Able to direct the choices of novices\light computer users since they often seek their advice.
Good post. 90% of computer users lost you after 2 mins. It'd be a pain for me to get then have to take the command line code and determine what the program is doing. It would be more useful to a far larger user group if say you could ID the top 10 disk users in a say new Windows 11 system, an old one, a windows 10 system. In normal operation. If there is any real alt to this. Like yeah you can shut off defender, but leave yourself open, not an option. I'm not sure there are many who could make it thru the instructions far enough to determine what their issue is, but it might be the only way they can determine if it's a issue they just need to leave, if it's normal, etc..
If you can't fix the problem, which I have, what good is this video?
Exactly why I dumped Microslick and use Linux 19. Perfect system now. Fast. Stable. Free.
Spin disks have terrible performance in Windows 10 (and presumably 11). Spin disks work great in Windows 7. What changed? Sloppy programming. Windows 10 starts about 60 antivirus scan threads simultaneously WITH a similar number of threads building the search index. SSD's don't really care about that so with an SSD you don't need any fancy scheduling or queue re-ordering.
If I reboot my Windows 10 computer, I can FORGET doing ANYTHING for the next HOUR. For the next two hours after that it is going to be sluggish.
So about that SSD. They tend to fail *abruptly* so I would never keep vital data on SSD. Unfortunately, computer performance is now horrible without it. Oh, what to do! Oh, easy, stick with Windows 7 a bit longer.
Good advice. I'd add, always put in 2 large NVME drives, 1 TB or larger, and keep a "backup" file on both. Doesn't hurt to buy one of those external drives to triplicate. It's not expensive and will eventually save you.
@@floycewhite6991 My archives are on NAS; network attached storage. 4 disks of 6 TB each in RAID 5; and an offsite copy. I fire up the NAS only occasionally to copy things to it and then turn it off. That way it isn't even online in case my computer gets a cryptovirus or something.
An EMP will wipe out all SSD and Flash storage instantly. And I mean about one nanosecond. Flash depends on embedded electrons to maintain state (1 or 0) and a high energy pulse will simply reset the entire chip to 1's or 0's depending on what is a lack-of-charge. A nearby lightning strike might have similar effect.
Spin disks ignore electric field BUT obviously are sensitive to magnetic field. However most spin disks are somewhat or strongly magnetically shielded; after all, the magnets in the actuator are incredibly strong. I have disassembled many disks to erase the contents but I keep the magnets. They are much too powerful to be used as refrigerator magnets.
Spin disks tend to give warning before failing. I've managed to recover everything even from rather substantially damaged disks that won't boot. They need to spin of course.
No. I disagree. HDD have excellent performance in win 10 and probably w11. You need:
1) a modern HDD with 500mb cache
2) to be able to format optimally (sector size
3) alignment with special software
But most people don't know how
@@addydiesel6627This is likely related to my computer at work. It's HDD performance is terrible but in every other way the computer is superior; a Dell workstation with 6 core Xeon processor and four channels of ECC memory totaling 32 gigabytes of RAM. It permits an astonishing number of threads to concurrently make disk requests, queue length sometimes around 100 outstanding requests and latency over 1000 ms. It was even worse before I turned off OneDrive. Applications time out and fail. In other words, it is unbalanced and the HDD is the bottleneck. I do suspect a problem with the HDD or controller, it ought not to be THAT bad.
I think if I were still using mechanical disks, I would not want to throw an ssd at the problem right off the bat. I feel this is a mistake too often made-- throwing new hardware at a software problem.
I'd want to know what's causing the constant disk thrashing and why. I'm not going to immediately run to nix or an ssd solution. To me, that's just giving up before you've started.
If Defender was to blame, I'd be some kind of p**sed. I wouldn't want my av acting like malware in its own right.
I'd go to the nearest MS help forum and looksee who else might have the problem, and if they found a fix.
Also, I feel that Windows is too essential to dump it for a distro of nix whenever I get mad at the OS.
I use Linux that tells me the initiation of activity. Windows browsing the net is forced from outside to constantly report detailed of Your activity and what Your harddisc contains to the provider, to Microsoft and to the server of the web-side You're on. What did You expect? All this "telling" and the advertising is the most of Your traffic - just a few % is what You think you're doing.
You had a handle on the problem when you said "Windows."
I had a feeling I would find another tool to use here 🤓
So is it worth turning off Defender when you are not connected to the Internet?
Yes. You can set Defender to not run at all, or to run only a "quick scan" on startup. You can do a full scan once a month or so whenever you finish using the computer and plan to be home for several hours (overnight).
I just wonder: how to install a software, if the person states that not even the mouse is responsive...?
Any danger this constant activity can wear out your SSD write cycle lifetime? You won’t hear any clicking. The monitor might answer this question.
Buy a quality NVME. For instance, a Western Digital SN850X
It's probably just reading, not writing. Reading doesn't hurt. Writing hurts a bit but there are algorithms in the drive that spread the writing evenly over the complete drive. I mean it's not always writing at the same physical location when for example you keep on overwriting the same file over and over again.
slow hard drive.usually old...get a fast SSD..they are cheap and much faster and you will not hear the constant rain on the tin roof chatter
The problem is that Windows is huge. It is so big that it takes a long time to load things from disk. The problem with totally insecure operating systems (like Microsoft Windows) is that they have to scan very often for viruses. A secure operating system does not have that need, because the system itself does not catch viruses.
The solution is to use a system that is much more optimized and secure, like any GNU/Linux distribution.
With the way windows is designed and optimized it won’t be long till SSD’s are as slow as hard drives.
Windows put in its fast start feature -- that is, never actually turn off the computer -- to get around startup slowness. Wouldn't you know SSDs and then NVME drives got so cheap "fast start" was no longer necessary.
If moores law is correct, eventually data density improvement on HDD will allow them to overtake SSD. Especially as SSD will only get faster if they get hotter and hotter
No software or utility can beat buying a faster hard drive... 😀
What is this "disk" thing you speak of?
Upgrade to Ubuntu Linux running MATE desktop.
Then Windows starts updating without permission. It also spies. It's like a trojan!
All advise with no shown solution. Not what I was looking for but thanks.
If you have an HDD, an SSD will eliminate the problem.
Each solution is going to be different. "My car won't start." "Here's how you figure out which part is broken." "Why don't you tell me what's broken on *my* car?"
@@darrennew8211 Well, it's a very commonly reported problem and the commonly reported solution that works is to switch to an SSD. It's good advice in any case, if you still have your OS on a hard disk. And it's cheap.
Windows 10 does this all the time!!! I’m sick and tired of people saying the usual, “You need more RAM… it’s paging” I HAVE 32 GB OF RAM!!!! How much RAM does Windows need??? Also, I don’t understand people saying, “It does this for about 5 - 10 minutes after I boot up before I can use it” My Windows 10 PC sometimes does this for HOURS AT A TIME and is becomes basically useless.
I'm a Linux'y person, but I'm guessing you could MD5 hash that .exe and make sure it's a recognised binary
My guess more is that he's swapping. Windows Defender doesn't trash the disk that hard (if it's running right, of course).
Ever consider upgrading from DOS or XP ???
Windows would be a lot faster if it didn't do 25,365 updates every 10 minutes...
While that's hyperbole, it does update often (the anti-malware database updates at least daily). But then ... my Linux boxes get updates almost every day it seems as well.
@@askleonotenboomyes, but it only takes a Linux desktop a few seconds to apply updates and you don't need to reboot.
I actually tested one day that I could update 3 Linux desktops, 1 Linux laptop and I think about 6 Linux VMS and containers in less time than it took one Windows laptop to do a standard Windows update.
It's just beyond belief that people accept how slow and mid 90s Windows still is.
@@Reprint001 About half of my Linux updates require a reboot.
I used to use Process Monitor all the time when I was on drugs. I got off drugs and now I don't need it, any more.
Maybe it's DRIVERS?
The reason you have constant disk activate in windows is because you did not throw away your old computer and get a solid state drive. Are you also having problems with your horse and buggy?
My horsie is FINE, thank you very much. I love her and would never abandon her!
My work laptop was like this; no longer a problem (I retired!)
Hi, Leonard.
Why Do I Have Constant Disk Activity in Windows? Because it is busy spying on you....
The question is, why are you using Windows? Oh, that's right, you need to play games.....lol
Oh I hate this so much! Windows is always writing to the SSD. And now it is wearing out!