What's going on with my Windows 10 laptop!!

icecream-guy · April 19, 2016, 08:57:58 AM

I figured it'd be the alignment of the stars or maybe the phase of the moon.

Dieselboy · April 19, 2016, 09:49:24 AM

Yep I agree

Dieselboy · June 10, 2016, 05:08:42 AM

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?)

deanwebb · June 10, 2016, 06:01:08 AM

Wait -- this is an upgrade?

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.

Dieselboy · June 11, 2016, 04:50:06 AM

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 :/

Dieselboy · July 06, 2016, 02:44:09 AM

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.

deanwebb · July 06, 2016, 07:46:24 AM

Yep. It's always a hardware problem.

AnthonyC · July 06, 2016, 11:07:49 AM

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.

Dieselboy · July 06, 2016, 10:29:13 PM

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.

wintermute000 · 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!

Dieselboy · July 07, 2016, 10:11:57 PM

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

deanwebb · July 08, 2016, 08:43:49 AM

Back in my days, we had to hand-crank our hard drives. And we were happy.

icecream-guy · July 08, 2016, 10:58:00 AM

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....

deanwebb · July 08, 2016, 01:33:56 PM

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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