Frequent unresponsiveness, 100% hardware disk usage, 0% software usage

I installed Win8 over the last weekend. Things were working fine for the first five days. Just day before i started seeing apps being unresponsive and noticed that the Task Manager showed 100% disk usage. The process taking the most disk is 'System'

Yesterday things became worse; the startup started taking way too long; after starting up launching any app takes up to 10 mins and the HDD led is constantly on; making the sytem completely unstable and stuck.

I have the following conf: Dell Inspiron 14R N010, Core i3 (1st gen), 4 GB, 500 GB Hdd (45% free)

Guys - please help!!!

How old is your hard drive? The problem with mine was that it was failing completely, just slowly.

Did you ever find out what needed to be done to fix your issue? A new hard drive?

I purchased a brand new Windows 8 ASUS laptop on 10/26/2012. Everything worked wonderfully for about a week and then out of nowhere, I began to have the same issues you were facing. I tried to do what I could to diagnose and fix the issue, even went as far as to delete and reinstall Windows, which did not solve the problem. The laptop is at an ASUS repair center currently, but I was just wondering what was the solution for you.

I know this is a fairly old thread but I need to share what happened and What fixed the issue. This is a copy and paste job from another post i made elsewhere, but as I had no resolve by trying the other things here is What worked for me.

Just thought I would share my experiences with others, Well I had tried everything mentioned on all forums to no avail, My problem eneded up being that my computer has one of these quick loading bays and the connection got damaged after a little accident (My dog decided to urinate against my pc, no laughing please) Anyway in a fit of anger I pulled the front of the pc off to wash the fornt of the case, luckily no other damage other than a stinky case, and managed to knacker the connection, so I just swapped it out from the quick load bay and did a direct connect from SSD to mobo and hey presto all is working well now, In fact it is working even better than it was before. So for anyone else experiencing problems try this first before resorting to all the other things that are posted.