Windows 10 - Task Manager Says Disk Is At 100% Usage

Question

OS: Windows 10 (Pre-Installed)

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 500GB free

Processor: i5

Disk Type: Hard Drive

I have had Windows 10 for over a year now and it has been fine (a part from corruption about 6 months ago).

However, yesterday, I got an update for Windows 10 as well as uninstalling an old driver and installing a new one for a graphics tablet I just got. Today, I noticed games running slower than usual and freezing sometimes.

Task Manager and Resource Manager both say my disk is at 100% usage:

I'm not sure if this is related to the drivers or update. I tried reverting to the previous Windows 10 update, as well as uninstalling the driver, but nothing changed.

I have tried many suggestions from the web such as:

• Disabling Superfetch, Windows Search, BITS
• Editing the AHCI in the registry

None of them worked.

I am doing an anti-virus scan currently.

Any ideas what I could do?

EDIT:

Many people have been pointing out that McAfee is taking up a lot of the disk usage. This is because I was running a scan during the screenshot. Without McAfee scanning, it is still at 100% disk usage overall, but McAfee is not up there.

Not sure if this changes anything.

EDIT 2:

Found a fix.

See my answer, below.

Answer 1

The data come from the disk controller (Microsoft explained it in the video at 6m55 seconds). The disk controller tells Windows that the drive is busy and Windows displays it in the taskmanager graph.

In the graph you can see the McAfee is currently hitting the disk most, so it looks like it does a scan of your box.

The best option to prevent this is to use a SSD and not a traditional HDD.

Answer 2

So, I think I've found it. Unless my computer just decided to stop being stubborn, this command seemed to work:

chkdsk /R

(Check Disk and fix any problems).

It still has 100% Disk Usage when I load my PC, but I guess that is normal loading stuff. After 5 minutes or so it drops down to 1% or 0%.

Check Disk was the last thing I tried before it started working, so I assume that's what did it.

Thanks for the help, anyway!

Answer 3

Make sure you have activated windows. This happened with me too,till the time I didn't activated my windows 10. After that it goes well. I think there is no problem with drivers or any update,Its just that Microsoft wants you to activate or buy windows that's why this problem is coming. Although it appears to be unrealistic thing,but it happened with me.

Answer 4

I'd highly suggest disabling the Runtime broker.

• Open Task Manager ( CTRL+SHIFT+ESC or right-click the taskbar)
• If you don't see multiple tabs, click More Details.
• Click Memory to sort by the amount of memory consumed. Runtime Broker will be at or near the top.
• Click Runtime Broker.
• Click End Process Tree.

Please notice that if it automatically restarts itself. Find this process and suspend it. If that still does not work you may need to go into some registry. To disable Runtime Broker, press Windows + R and fill in: regedit, then press Enter
From the Windows Registry Editor, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TimeBroker]

Double-click on the "Start" field and change the "Value data" from "3" to "4".
That's it!
In the future, if you want to turn this feature on, do the same like above but replace number "4" by "3" or "2".

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Also inside your Computer Performance Monitor. Find and graph:

Process\Handle Count

This measures the total number of handles that are currently open by a process. This counter indicates a possible handle leak if the number is greater than 10,000.

Process\Thread Count

This measures the number of threads currently active in a process. There may be a thread leak if this number is more than 500 between the minimum and maximum number