Disk usage constantly at 100%

[MatthewS21]

Model 17-cp0035cl

HP 17.3" Touchscreen Laptop - AMD Ryzen 5 5500U - Windows 11

My old HP laptop disk was constantly running at 100% and it was extremely slow. I tried a number of diagnostic and recovery tools, reformatting, remove/update drivers, everything I could think of and it still was constantly maxing. I figure something is busted with either a bus or the hard drive and, rather than trying to fix it, why not upgrade?

I get this new machine, it's not top of the line, for sure, but it should be leagues better than my old laptop. Trying to do updates and everything else, the disk is maxing out at 100%, constantly. Is this normal? If I reboot and let it sit for 10 minutes, still 100%.

The weird thing is, according to task manager, it's at 100% with a throughput of < 26 mb/s, sometimes  as low as 10 mb/s. I know it's not an SSD, but it should still have more than that.

Is this HP's support software? Is it normal for a new computer to initially run like this? Is Windows 11 the culprit?

Thanks for any help

[banhien]

@MatthewS21 

Its specs

        https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c07905316

It is an above average machine. Please use Task Manager then sort the descending order to see which one is the culprit

           

Regards.

[MatthewS21]

@Bahnien

Task manager is how I know it was at 100% and the throughput to the disk is under 26mb/s. 

It stays running at 100% with usually one process using between 15 and 25 mb/s, maybe one more using a couple of mb/s, then 6 to 12 using 0.1mb/s. The processes using the most change. 

After seeing how poor the performance was, I uninstalled Mcafee because it's garbage and I uninstalled the HP support stuff because most of those types of utilities eat up RAM. They're useful, but memory hungry and they constantly run in the background.

Thanks for responding!

[banhien]

@MatthewS21 

What is/are the name(s) of the process(es) ?

Regards.

[MatthewS21]

It's anything from Windows background processes to 3rd party programs (Chrome, MS Click-to-run, etc). One process will jump up to double digits and be the only one running at that speed, then drop off with a different process jump up.

It's random which process is at the top. 

[banhien]

@MatthewS21 

How much room on C: now ? Your machine has 12GB of RAM with a slow HDD but I don't think paging/swapping caused the slow down (due to too much spinning). In %, how much RAM (Memory) is being used ? And who is on the top ?

Regards.

[MatthewS21]

RAM is usually fine, 30 to 40%.

The biggest offenders change, sometimes it's a windows process, sometimes it's chrome but it never exceeds ~25mb/s (according to task manager). There's about 10 or so that I've noticed so far (in the hour or so minutes I've played with it). 

I was wondering if first time set up was causing too many writes to the hdd (updates and whatnot). I didn't check the specs of the hdd but I feel like even a slower modern one shouldn't be bogged down by 25 mb/s or less. 

[banhien]

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@MatthewS21 wrote:

RAM is usually fine, 30 to 40%. .

---

@MatthewS21

That what I said paging/swapping is not a problem, we can narrow down to slow mechanical disk (only 5400RPM) and slow CPU. Nothing you can do about CPU but upgrading 2.5" HDD to 2.5" SSD would help.

Actually you can add M.2 NVMe SSD to your machine then move Windows and applications/programs to new drive. Keep existing 2.5" HDD for users data. You can use standard M.2 NVMe SSD on market today, for example

              https://www.samsung.com/au/memory-storage/nvme-ssd/970-evo-nvme-m-2-ssd-500gb-mz-v7e500bw/

Regards.

[subnath]

It should not be 100% unless your HDD is slow ( data per second). Please see the details of Disk Usage in Task Manager, that is, which programs are active and using data transfer. By the way, what is the usage of CPU and RAM?

[MatthewS21]

Thanks for your help, I really do appreciate it.

I do find it kind of disappointing that, out of the box, this machine is maxed out. When  I try to enter the pin to get into windows, it takes a couple of seconds to check it. From initiating a reboot to disk not running at 100%, where chrome won't take 30 seconds to load,  takes almost 7 minutes. Hitting the start button bumps the usage back up to 100% for a second or two. 

5400 RPMs is slow but I feel like it can't be that slow, right? 

And the AMD 5 5500 U isn't so terrible a cpu, right?