New
#1
Something causes 100% HDD load, system temporarily very sluggish
Hello to all and thanks for having me. I have a very strange situation and hopefully you will be able to assist me, as I have solved several issues before simply by browsing this very usefull forum. OK, here is the story:
I am running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 since 2016 when I purchased all the PC components new. The computer had been running without a hitch until a couple of months ago. All of a sudden, the following scenario emerged:
- Upon loading Windows and passing the Welcome screen, Desktop appears, everything loads fine... and a minute or two after it, Windows starts doing something in the background. The HD LED turns 100% on, but I don't hear the HD doing anything. If I opened an application and this happened, the program would run very sluggish or simply freeze, showing the "Not Responding" message in the window title bar. All this "disk thrashing" lasts for about 3-5 minutes. After that, the HD LED returns to normal, the frozen apps come to life again and everything runs smoothly. This happens only once after boot and is very annoying, plus it sounds like something is simply torturing the HD.
Here is what I have tried so far:
- Thinking that maybe some background service is causing the problem, I disabled them all using MSCONFIG tool, as well as all the startup items. It didn't help.
- I run some disk diagnostic tools and they all reported that the hard drive is 100% healthy. I disabled the Windows defragmenter service because I am using Diskeeper for the job (disabling Diskeeper also makes no difference).
- Then I tried starting up some of the services manually to see if one of them would cause this state and several of them came into being. However, I think that they simply triggered the condition as they were all set to Manual. When the condition ends, all of those services remain at Stopped, so I'm guessing that none of them got started and caused the issue in the first place.
- Process Monitor did not help much because it only catched "System" as the one item that used the HD most, but I have little information on what exactly it is. It also becomes slow and non-responsive during the monitoring, so when the issue goes away, it instantly presents more than a thousand of lines that accumulated during the "non-responsiveness". Whatever is hogging the computer takes absolute priority over it and I don't know how to detect it.
- I did a full system scan with the latest Kaspersky Internet Security in trial mode, just to be sure there are no malware causing the issue. The scan came clean, which is expected because I am using this computer mostly for work.
- I cleaned the heatsinks of the CPU and motherboard to eliminate the possibility od overheating. Everything is running at stock speed.
Here are the situations which can trigger the issue:
- Starting any hardware monitoring/information software, such as AIDA64, Hardware Monitor, CPU-Z that looks into the system internals will invoke the situation;
- Changing a service's start-up mode by going into its properties. Upon changing its running mode and clicking on the Apply or OK button, the issue is triggered.
- "New Hardware Found" wizard tray pop-up (for instance, plugging in a new USB stick for the first time in any of the ports, installing a different graphics card, etc) will invoke the thrashing. Then I have to wait for it to finish in order to continue with the installation. But, if I wait for the hogging to finish and THEN plug a new external hardware, the new hardware popup appears and installs the new hardware in a matter of seconds because there is nothing hogging it.
- Simply waiting for a couple of minutes upon booting to windows and doing nothing will start the issue as well.
If I was doing something, if a dialogue was opened or anything else at the moment when the issue starts, the cursor turns into the "busy state" (rotating circle) and nothing can be clicked, everything is simply locked out of any user interaction until the thrashing/hogging completes.
Now, I thought that maybe my hard drive was going bad, but all the diagnostic software said the opposite. Plus, the issue does not happen in safe mode, so I guess the HD is just fine.
There must be some Windows process, feature, task or whatever the hell it is that causes this. I never use automatic Windows Update, I like to check the updates and their review online before installing them. Windows Search and Superfetch services are also disabled. So this really came out of nowhere, I can't put my finger on anything specific that I did which resulted in the start of this annoying issue. The PC simply becomes super sluggish and almost unusable until that unknown workings of something finish whatever it is doing. The only workaround is to boot and wait for it to finish (or invoke it with one of the "triggers" and wait). After that, the PC is super fast, running perfectly normal for hours.
Please, I beg of you, as I have run out of ideas, if you have any other thing I might try or look into, please help.
Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for any ideas.