All the time while I was away, Windows kept freezing and doing weird things. Turning the laptop on took around 15 to 20 minutes before it would start to allow me to use it in terms of opening things, clicking etc. I took this as it needed a re-image, ie too much crap installed and too many services starting at boot time.
So I've done the re-imaging and it's not really any better even with a base Win10 image. Now I'm unsure if it is a motherboard problem or disk problem. I notice that the task manager says disk is mostly 100% utilised (screenshot) included. In the screenshot you can see that the latency is high (seen up to 14000ms response time!) but the "read and write" speeds are low. When I was copying back my backed up data from a USB HDD, I was seeing again 100% active but the write speed would be up to 80mbps which I thought was normal for a regular HDD, it's probably 5400rpm.
I never bothered to take note of what the disk usage was like when it was running fine. But when this disk is 100% utilised the system is unusable. I can move the mouse fine but cannot click anything as things begin to go "not responding". I was thinking that the disk is failing. But SMART is saying "OK".
I was also thinking it could possibly be a motherboard bios problem so going to look for an update.
Any ideas? :'(
Had a similar issue on windows 8, do not remember how i fixed it but i found the solution in the following site . Maybe you can try those links
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-2813275/disk-usage-100.html
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083595
thanks mate,
Actually I think this is getting worse so hopefully I have a catastrophic failure soon so I know what the problem is.
Thanks for the links. I stopped both windows search and superfetch and didn't notice a change at all. The highest disk usage in terms of bytes a moment ago was powershell at 0.2mbps (probably running a GPO) but the disk is red at 100% active.
I'm not sure how the task manager works out that it's at 100% capacity but I don't think it's lying as it takes me a few minutes to press start and then type services.msc. :-s
run a chkdsk /R on the disk and let it run and complete, I've had experiences like this when there is a bad disk spot in the swap file area.
other possibilities would be some sort of malware, run malwarebytes and check that too.
You *do* have an offline backup of your data files, right?
Yes I do have a backup :)
I've run scans but not a chkdsk. will do that now.
It's a bit better after windows updates but still sluggish. Hope the disk is bad so I can request an upgrade to an SSD :mrgreen:
Regarding malware - I done a fresh install of Windows 10. The malware might be all that DRM crap? :)
thanks all :)
Replacing the disk had zero effect.
Replacing the RAM made it worse (may be because I went from 16GB on 2 sticks to 4GB).
Done a bios update too but no effect.
I've turned off notifications "show me tips about windows" and all others on that system settings page within Windows, as well as disabled windows search and superfetch and the result is around 50% disk utilisation now, so the system is somewhat usable. However just clicking the start menu causes utilisation to shoot up to 90 to 100% for a brief moment.
So based on the above, the next thing I can think of is that it seems like motherboard has had it.
Spoke to the big man, he says put in a hardware requisition form for a replacement.
Are there any diagnostic tools that could give indication that the motherboard is causing the problems?
Are there tools? Yes.
Have I ever used them? No.
A problem that can be solved by writing a check wasn't a problem. It was an expense.
Quote from: deanwebb on April 13, 2016, 08:18:21 AM
Are there tools? Yes.
Have I ever used them? No.
A problem that can be solved by writing a check wasn't a problem. It was an expense.
My problem is, I don't like spending money without justification. Yes my laptop is unusably slow but I would like to say the problem is X and it would cost this much to repair and this much to buy new.
Laptop is usable since disabling those services but it's still sluggish, especially for a high spec machine. I'm going to keep using it and see what happens. I'm kind of expecting eventual catastrophic failure, which is then easy to call it an expense. :)
Time = money. How much is your time worth? Spend 2 days to determine the motherboard is bad, plus the cost of a new motherboard, plus the time to install new motherboard, or just buy a new system copy my files, and done.
-Otanx
Spot on, Otanx :)
That's why we RMA everything around here. Faster than troubleshooting.
:yeahright:
Sometimes it's true though! And if you're soon to be going out of warranty, it's better to do the RMA to be safe else not do the RMA and find out later that it should have been.
This week my laptop is being a good little laptop. Absolutely no idea why either.
:cheers:
Hardware issue for sure, in my reckoning. Hardware about to fail is random as hell. It has good days and bad days and even stretches where you think that it's all better again, but over time, the frequency and intensity of bad things increases.
Time to back up everything, not to add anything new, and get that replacement ready to go.
I figured it'd be the alignment of the stars or maybe the phase of the moon.
Yep I agree :)
So, still this laptop gives me issues when I need it most. (isn't that a song)
I googled and found that this is my EXACT issue: http://superuser.com/questions/959552/diagnosing-100-percent-disk-usage-in-windows-10
HOWEVER, that issue is specific to laptops running an SSD. I have a regular spinny disky drivy thing instead. I also dont have that specific AHCI .sys driver file. But I do get the same event viewer logs just after the problems. I tried the fix anyway and it made it so much worse it took me almost an hour to reverse it.
Last night I uninstalled the AHCI driver and rebooted. The laptop never came back, restore didnt work either so I needed to "reset this pc". It was like brand new until a few minutes ago when I closed the lid and sent it to sleep, got a beer then came back. Upon log in, disk at 100% again and everything not responding.
I'm still not sure if it's hardware or software related. I might push the win7 image on it next week and see how that goes. I had been running windows 10 for quite some time as a trial before this issue.
Event viewer logs say the disk has bad blocks but I think that this is a red herring since the computer has read/write issues to the disk although the disk is fine. I have swapped the HDD already and re-push the win10 image which didn't help.
The laptop is quite decent spec so don't just want to chuck it.
Other users have reported their windows 10 going slow too.. hence the reluctance to just get another laptop -it could be windows.
Given the time since the last post, has anyone else come across anything since? I'm figuring only time will tell (that's another song I think?)
:)
Wait -- this is an upgrade?
:facepalm4:
It's a hardware compatibility issue, quite likely. My home laptop's hardware did not like Win10 AT ALL. Rolled back to Win7 just fine and all was well after that, except it keeps bugging me to upgrade to Windows 10...
I used to work at Microsoft, supporting Windows 95. Clean installs always went better. If a guy had problems after upgrading, we said to copy all the data files, FDISK and reinstall. Worked like a champ after that. I SO wanted Win10 to be the first time I upgraded a MSFT product without issue... and I at least got to roll it back instead of FDISK and reinstall, so that was really, really good.
I did the upgrade one day months ago to test it as my laptop needed a wipe and reinstall anyway. I tested this for months without any problems then I started getting this problem while I was away back in March. So when I got back to the office I wiped it and pushed the win10 image onto it - same problem. Swapped the HDD and pushed the image, same problem. So here I am.
Thinking if I push the win7 image onto it the issue is still there then I'll get a replacement :/
I've bought a new laptop and a Samsung 850 SSD drive.
Whilst I'm waiting for the laptop to arrive, I've put the SSD into the laptop giving me all the issues on this post, and done a fresh install of Windows 10 along with all the programs. The idea is to test the laptop with an SSD as well as create a new Windows 10 image.
Not seeing any issues whatsover using the SSD, and with the build complete and windows updates finished, it takes 15 seconds from cold boot to the desktop. I've not disabled any indexing or any windows 10 "notifications" which I needed to turn off to make the laptop usable with the other HDD I tested with.
I'm just wondering if the 5200RPM drives are just not useful anymore, ie there's just too much small read/writes for the 5200RPM to cope with.
I do need more time to test though. I might go back to using the laptop full time with the SSD to see if the problem comes back, but given that it's an SSD another idea is that the problem might still be there but wont present itself.
:think:
Yep. It's always a hardware problem. :problem?:
You can use a tool like processexplorer to check detailed IO usage per process. (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396). It is much more granular than what task manager will give you.
I did try that during the issue but nothing really stood out. I had Chrome and other things which I was really using during that time at the top and nothing untoward there. So this suggested a HDD issue. Replaced the HDD with a known-good and the exact same issues occurred. Although the HDD was another 5200rpm drive. So gathered that the HDD controller was the cause. I reinstalled the AHCI controller and reset the OS because it wouldn't boot and the issue was all fixed, until a few hours of use. The point at which it all went to crap again was after I closed the laptop which made it sleep. On return from sleep (about 15 mins later after I went and got a beer) the laptop went to crap and 100% utilisation on the disk again and system extremely unresponsive. To give some idea of how unresponsive the system was, I was seeing 32 seconds HDD latency at worst, with averages of well over 2 seconds (2000 ms and above). From cold boot it took at least 15 minutes to get the desktop to display but it took at least another 15 minutes before you could start clicking on things. For a system with 16GB RAM and an i7 CPU it's just not expected.
If it hasn't got an SSD, I just don't use it. Period. This is 2016 biatches!
Quote from: wintermute000 on July 07, 2016, 06:06:57 AM
If it hasn't got an SSD, I just don't use it. Period. This is 2016 biatches!
You know what I've been leaning this way for the company. I see decent spec computers slowing down and it's only because of the HDD.. I am suggesting that we buy SSD's for our laptops instead of buying new laptops in some / most cases.
So I did start using the laptop today. I started copying some data and I configured outlook. During this, I see the disk utilisation go up to 100% again. When this happened I didn't notice any issue immediately, but then when the disk latency started going up in the 100s of ms, the mouse cursor was freezing and the system was freezing. So this pretty much confirms the system has a fault as the SSD drive has defintiely alleviated the issue, but the issue is still present.
I'm glad now, because I was concerned that the laptop may actually be okay. But system freezing when running applications is not good :)
Back in my days, we had to hand-crank our hard drives. And we were happy.
Quote from: deanwebb on July 08, 2016, 08:43:49 AM
Back in my days, we had to hand-crank our hard drives. And we were happy.
and there he is now....
That feller there is a DBA, trying to line up the drive just right so he can read the sector he needs.
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