Laptop constantly processing

We’ve had a HP Pavilion 64bit running Win 10 for about 2 years now. But from day one it’s felt like it’s been doing too much i.e. constantly processing.

All I can hear is the click click click of the hard drive. How can I get it to calm TF down? Virus checkers reveal no problems.

Ctrl+Alt+Delete – Task Manager, then see what’s running

Swap the HDD for an SSD.

How much RAM does it have? RAM starvation == disk thrashing.

SSD and more RAM.
This is the way.

Do you have One-Drive?

Antivirus?

I have a new work laptop – plenty powerful – and these really make the fan blow.

Check for programs that are set to run on start up which you don’t need until you want to use them.

those bitcoins don’t mine themselves, you know

I had an issue on my work machine – disc processing was constantly at 100%. Check by looking at running processes with ctrl/alt/del.

It wasn’t disc full.

There’s a few online guides how to stop it. I found as soon as my machine did an update, it was back to the same 100% disc processing.

I did a swap to an SSD and that’s solved it.

If you don’t leave it on for long periods of time, and the computer is low spec, sometimes windows update never gets chance to complete properly due to the time it takes, so it starts again next time you power on.

That’s just a guess though – you need to look at task manager to see whats chewing up resources, and what resources its maxing.

Antivirus?

TBH if it’s a “from day one” issue then this isn’t a bad shout. Many laptops come bundled with trial AV which will ask you to pay for it after a month or three; this is an effective marketing tactic as there’s an assumption that it is somehow “better” because it came with the machine, it’s an argument I heard quite often back in my support days.

Thing is, the bundled foisterware can be of varying quality. There is a breed of AV which will attain high test results by dint of the fact that it’s aggressively scanning the machine and to hell with anything else. If you’re running any third-party AV I’d uninstall it, Windows Defender will automatically kick in and it’s perfectly adequate for anyone who doesn’t have a hyperactive right index finger. Worst case scenario you can always reinstall it if it doesn’t change anything, should you feel so compelled.

“Foisterware” – My new favorite word of the day.

Putting in an SSD will not solve the fundamental problem of what’s accessing your disk all the time.

You can use the Resource Monitor to find out what’s taking up all the resources. Google for instructions.

My partners laptop had similar issues and uninstalling all the Norton etc stuff made a pretty big difference.

I think I just put on the free edition of Bitdefender instead.

Putting in an SSD will not solve the fundamental problem of what’s accessing your disk all the time.

Agreed, you need to find out where the bottleneck is. task manager in Win10 is usually good enough to give you a prime suspect, resource monitor is more in depth if it’s still not clear. Throwing more and faster hardware at it may only mask the issue.

It would help if the OP posted the specification of their machine, but ultimately, if the fundamental issue is a rogue browser extension, or some malware or AV or something, that should be the first port of call before a new drive or more ram.

Just one thing to add, if you don’t know, the columns in task manager, split into CPU, RAM, Disk etc.

You’ll find the list jumps about all over the place depending on what the system is doing at the time, so if you click the top of a particular column, say CPU, it will organise all the processes into order of how demanding they currently are, ascending, or descending, so you may need to click twice, and that will show you whats maxing out a particular piece of hardware.

You’re not using Microsoft Teams by any chance are you? Since we started working from home the company I work for has requested we all use it on our work PCs (which we have home with us) and it’s one of the biggest resource hogs I’ve ever seen. Grinds my machine to a halt. I ended up removing it from start up applications and use the browser version instead, unless we have a meeting in which case I use the app. Horrible piece of software.

Putting in an SSD will not solve the fundamental problem of what’s accessing your disk all the time.

It did with me.

Teams works fine for me on my old shonker of a laptop. i5 3210m, 4gb ram. 5200rpm hard drive.

Takes a while to open teams, maybe 1min or so.

But I also run a tight ship with that laptop.. Nothing unnesential for the computer to run is allowed to run on startup.

It did with me.

I don’t think anyone’s arguing that point, SSDs offer huge gains in start up time and opening apps, and general disk i/o.

But it’s worth understanding why your PC is slow before upgrading parts.. no point installing an SSD if your issue is your CPU is getting nailed by some malware bit coin farmer that you are unaware of. Youll just notice it less, the problem will still be there.

Just done a fresh windows 10 install on a 3 month old laptop for my son. Had MacAfee and a load of HP rubbish installed, slow to boot, laggy to use. Different machine now, responsive and easy to use. Next job is an SSD to speed up booting. Why manufacturers hobble their machines I’ve no idea, it’s like filling the boot of a low power car with concrete and wondering why it won’t accelerate.

Also turned an old Vista laptop from a doorstop into a pleasantly usable machine with a fresh install.

Why manufacturers hobble their machines I’ve no idea, it’s like filling the boot of a low power car with concrete and wondering why it won’t accelerate.

Because they get a fat brown envelope from said suppliers. It can help keep the cost down for the end user too, allegedly.

My old HP gets really hot and the fan works hard all the time. Even in sleep mode the fan keeps going. Done some googling, but none of the suggestions have cured it.

My old HP gets really hot and the fan works hard all the time. Even in sleep mode the fan keeps going. Done some googling, but none of the suggestions have cured it.

Post up a screenshot of task manager.

Get a can of compressed air and blow all the accumulated dust out of it.

Post up a screenshot of task manager.

What are you expecting to see? Bunch of Chrome processes and the usual system stuff. Anything in particular that would keep the system fan running?

Get a can of compressed air and blow all the accumulated dust out of it.

Definitely worth a go. I’ll try that.

I have seen this twice recently on two different machines and they were both due to mechanical disc failures. Replacing the discs (one had mechanical HDD replaced and the other replaced with ssd cured the issue).

Definitely worth a go. I’ll try that.

Point of note if it’s not obvious, take the back off it and blow dust out. Not in from outside.

I had this on my laptop for several months. Fans running at full tilt almost constantly and when under load it’d go into thermal shutdown. I had it in bits multiple times fruitlessly, then one day I happened to spot a bit of fluff in the main extraction vent. Had at it with a pair of tweezers and carefully extracted a dust bunny the size of my thumb. I’m on it right now and it’s perfectly silent.

Nice one Cougar – cleaning the dust out has made a massive difference 👍

clicking – there were a bunch (of desktop?) drives that had the “click of death” which was a sign that the drive was about to die.

As has been said above – SSD makes a massive difference. Upgraded a basic laptop with a cheap SSD (~£60) and it changed it from taking 3-5mins to start to seconds. Note – some come with everything you need to copy your old drive – cable and software. Some laptops may have 2 drive bays.

My laptop had developed a habit of churning away at 25% CPU cause the fan to whine constantly, I found the WMI Provider Host was spinning away constantly. Unfortunately I couldn’t stop the service.
I then went through a process of killing any startup processes that could have been querying that service.
In the end I found it was the Garmin Connect application auto starting. Once I killed that from the system tray blissful silence!

Basically.. windows 10 doesn’t like it if you don’t have a SSD.

I would call it a flaw, but the flaw is really spinny HDDs, they’ve been the biggest bottleneck in computers for years, even without the 100% disc usage issue.

Bite the bullet and replace.

Well, this thread prompted me to take my PC apart and clean out the dust. It’s an old Gigabyte Brix Pro mini form factor thing, which are notorious for running hot and having a noisy fan (sounds like a hairdryer when the CPU is under load). I tried taking it apart before, but there was no obvious way to get the motherboard out to access the fan and heatsink, so I always just used a vacuum cleaner to suck as much dust out as possible. I finally did some internet searching and found a tear-down video, turns out there was a hidden screw that needed removing. The heatsink had some dust in it, but nowhere near as bad as I expected. Cleaned it out and it’s a world of difference.

Anything in particular that would keep the system fan running?

Whichever one has a large number in the ‘cpu’ column next to it!

Replacing the SSD will make the machine faster, but if it’s got some crap software using up all the resources, all that will happen will be that the crap software will do the things you don’t want it to do faster.

It’d be like complaining of a slow commute then buying a faster car. It’s not going to make the traffic go away.

molgrips
Member
Putting in an SSD will not solve the fundamental problem of what’s accessing your disk all the time.

Bet it does. I’ve done a fresh install before and got the problem. It’s a windows 10 issue.

What’s a Windows 10 issue?

It’s not a Windows 10 issue, it’s a computers issue. Insufficient RAM + spinny disk = PC on its arse, page file thrashing has been a thing longer than I’ve been alive.

Times they are a changing though. In ten years’ time we’ll all be laughing about back when we used to use mechanical hard disks, in the same way we look at floppy disks now. If they still exist they’ll be the domain of bulk storage where performance isn’t relevant.