Slow/sluggish disk access in Win 8.1

googler

OH complains of performance issues with Win 8.1 machine, so as a first step, I download and install WinDirStat to see if there's any issues with redundant data clogging up the 500Gb HDD (131Gb free of 454Gb)

I disabled all network connections and switched off Bitdefender AV prior to running WinDirStat, but in the time that it took it to scan this 500Gb disk, I went over to the other PC in the room, my Win XP machine, and not only downloaded WinDirStat, but ran it against a couple of my 2Tb drives, both of which completed before the 500Gb was done.

What could be slowing the disk access to this extent on the Win 8.1 machine? WinDirStat is read-only.

It seems to be slowing absolutely everything down - I try to access (say) Device Manager, and there's a spinning blue circle, a few seconds of (Not Responding) in the title bar of the window, and, after what seems like an eternity, a response. Same with Task Manager, and other utilities.

googler

DL'd Seagate tools for Windows, having established it's a Seagate drive, and so far it's passing all the read tests....

techquest

WizTree will, when run as administrator, show you all files on the drive, in a fraction of the time that WinDirStat takes to run. It does this by using local admin rights to read the MFT directly and does its analysis based on that instead of using Windows file APIs.

https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-finds-the-files-and-folders-using-the-most-disk-space-on-your-hard-drive/

Though as with everything only the pro version from jam has the ability to export results to a file.

https://www.jam-software.com/treesize/exporting_reporting_formats.shtml

John_Gray

How much RAM, and which CPU, does your OH's machine have?

googler

The speed of WinDirStat itself is not the issue

googler

John_Gray wrote: »

How much RAM, and which CPU, does your OH's machine have?

It's a Dell 3646 with 4Gb of RAM and an Intel Celeron J1800 2.41GHz.

In comparison, my XP machine has 3Gb RAM and an AMD Athlon 3800 2.01GHz

grumpycrab

Could be a number of reasons prime of which are:- knackered disk (run chkdsk); something's running in the background. Check the latter with Ctrl-Alt-Del -> Task Manager -> Details and look at the CPU column (click "CPU" to order the data).
Look at Processes tab and see what Disk usage is like. e.g. what process is using 100%
Guessing Windows Update is running...provide screen shots if unsure...

techquest

What processes are taking up most of the cpu usage in Task Manager? As grumpycrab suggests it could be something as simple as windows update running and is stuck in the process. Try a clean boot, if the problem is still there then maybe it's a drive issue as has been suggested.

Press the "Windows + R" key to open a Run box.
Type msconfig and click OK.
On the General tab, click Selective startup.
Clear the Load startup items check box.
Click the Services tab.
Select the Hide all Microsoft services check box (at the bottom).
Click Disable all.

Then reboot

Does the problem still arrise?

techquest

googler wrote: »

The speed of WinDirStat itself is not the issue

Appreciate that it's nothing to do with WinDirStat, just that wiztree does the job quicker. Each unto their own as they say.

techquest

You can also try the resource manager

Type Resmon into Start or the Run box
open Resource Monitor
Select the Disk tab.
This will give you a display with “Processes with disk activity

Frozen_up_north

My OHs Acer Win 10 laptop was taking ages (3~5 mins) to boot and settle down. It’s an AMD and had 4GB of ram and 320GB HDD. No amount of tweaking, disk cleaning, etc. had any effect.

I replaced the HDD with a 250GB SSD (cloned the disk, warts and all) and upgraded the ram to 8GB. It now boots and settles down in “seconds”, or at least takes well under a minute to be operational without the drive light illuminated.

I suspect the SSD had more effect than the additional RAM, but the speed up was significant.