Windows 8 - Constant Disk Usage

Question

My installation of Windows 8.1 is constantly being extremely sluggish due to constant high disk usage. Doing anything, whether it be saving a file, opening a webpage, or closing programs, is very slow. My disk usage sometimes stays at %100 for quite a while. I have run a chkdsk with the /r option, and no errors were reported, so the disk appears to be in good condition. The problem is most severe when using Chrome. Sometimes, tabs that I already had open take a minute or so just to render. When I watch the task manager when this is happening, the Chrome disk usage spikes to %100. Is there anything else I could check? My computer is almost unusable.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Turn off live tiles, when in chrome go to Tools → Task Manager and see whats running that could be consuming CPU usage. Scan for viruses or spyware if you already haven't done so. Make sure you have the most recent version of chrome installed and re-install and reboot.

If all else fails try reverting to an earlier version of chrome which can be found on FileHippo.

Windows 8.1 will try to relocate files that it decides are in bad spots on your hard drive, it will also read data that you have not requested and read and re-read until it gets a good copy of the data then it will try to relocate it.

It may do this relocation for days at a time so you could try changing your computer to performance mode and let it run over night and see if this behavior stops.

Answer 2

This sounds like it is most likely a disk problem. If it were my machine I would run Spinrite on it. Its a disk repair tool that works at a lower level on the disk than the Windows tools I've found that its fixed this kind of problem for me in the past.

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm Its not free but mine has paid for itself times over.