Really?!?

Question

I have just spent the last 45 minutes trying to get "100% disk use" down to a level where my wife can check her email and facebook for maybe twenty minutes before she heads out for the day. FORTY-FIVE minutes... killing process after process, to no avail. Signing out of the account and signing back in. Rebooting. Gave up. You win, Microsoft. You have improved your mealy OS to the point that it's totally unusable. Your OS thinks that what IT wants to do is far more important than what the user wants or needs to do. She left without being able to just take a few minutes to do what SHE wanted to do with HER computer. Are you listening, Microsoft?

I flatly refuse to engage in a tail-chasing waste of time trying to get this piece of garbage to do what it used to do very well, until some genius at Redmond decided to "improve" things, and now we're all stuck with the result.

There's no "reasonable reason" I should have to spend hours of time scouring the web or coming here and trying to implement a *very* long list of often confusing or unclearly written "try this" or "try that" to see if MAYBE one of them might work just to get this benighted thing to function *acceptably* well... and joy of joys, when one does actually seem to work... the issue is back in a matter of days. Or until the NEXT of an endless series of updates which often negate existing settings or set them back to whatever default is. Without telling you, of course.

This state of affairs is totally unacceptable. This once-good OS has been tinkered into a total mess that you have to be a software engineer to be able to coax into running reasonably well. OR have huge blocs of time to dedicate to trying to get things to work, and endless patience to perform them. I have neither one.

FIX this thing, Microsoft. If you were a car company, you'd be out of business in very short order, a dim bad memory like the Edsel.

You WON'T fix it, and I CAN'T fix it, so this is all that's left. Rant at you for foisting this OS obscenity on the world. There's a good reason NASA and other mission-critical entities do NOT use Windows in their hardware, and I'm contending with it every day lately.

I'd tear my hair out, but that's already gone. Maybe it's time to start in on the beard!

Answer 1

My "approach" to running Windows is to turn the thing on, read/compose/reply to emails, tool around on the web... and that's about it. Oh, and some occasional gaming. Nothing heavy duty, no messing around with Windows settings or drivers or constantly downloading & installing software... I just *use* the thing as I imagine anyone else would... and have nothing but trouble with it. I didn't even bother to mention the fact that within minutes of a clean reboot it drops all bluetooth connectivity, or that it loses my wireless connection at least once a week and when I try to re-connect, I get a "Can't connect to this network" message. It's done this pretty much from day one... and it does NONE of the things I've described here when I boot into Linux. Rock solid, no nonsense, just runs the way you'd expect things to run. Linux happens to be more limited in versatility than Windows is (hoping THAT will change), so for now Linux is for important stuff and Windows is for everything else.

So in what way am I misusing Windows, as you've implied?

Answer 2

I feel your pain. Was there ever a time when your wife's PC operated without all the current problems you mentioned?

Hi lintekPC... sure, she used to just open it up (we don't turn them OFF when done with them as a rule; it won't be long before we pick 'em up again, and the wait for reboot can get tedious. We DO turn them OFF every other day or so to 'give 'em a rest') and fire up facebook and her email and tool around merrily without an issue that wasn't of her own doing. At some point along the way, post "upgrade" or update, these problems started appearing regularly, and now it's a daily occurrence. I'd bite the bullet if there were a definitive fix for this such as a total re-install of Windows, but plenty have done just that and had the problem crop up again anyway, including upgrading to Windows11, and *still* having 100% disk use. That's a lot of work to go through for a roll of the dice as to whether it'll fix the issue or not... and even if it does, for how long? Mine was the same.... just open it up and go. Now it's open it up, pull up task manager, and start playing skeet-shoot with stupid useless (to me) processes for things I *never* use, or watch processes I can't touch sit at positions #1, 2, and 3 at the very top of the disk usage column, color-coded red and everything, humming merrily along and totally ignoring my clicks on email or browser or even Windows processes such as "Settings" so I can try to maybe fix the issue. More than once I've had to just bail out and hit the power button until the thing dies, then reboot, in order to get any kind of response from this thing at ALL. What earthly good is a PC that just says "Come back later and maybe I'll be ready for whatever it is you want?" Whose PC *IS* this thing, anyway? If this were a car, it'd be a lemon for sure!

Answer 3

Try turning off some startup processes.

And an old PC/Laptop also causes the problem because low RAM, disk space.

Can you please show me your PC/Laptop model?

Or open Task Manager then go to Startup then send me a screenshot of that and I will find for you some useless apps.

Well, Nick, I *have* done that; Windows doesn't show me all that many startup processes, and the ones I see I either use, or aren't causing issues (from the standpoint of seeing who's at the top of the disk usage heap when this thing turns into a paperweight at 100% disk usage - - *that's* always either "System" or one of the Defender processes, or "Microsoft Content" refreshing itself, or "Your Phone," or a ton of other things I never use. Why is it that this thing remembers stuff I looked at months ago online, but it can't figure out that there are a ton of things I just don't use?

It's like Windows simply fees as if it's own update processes are more important than what the user wants, and it doesn't bother to see if the whole system is failing to respond in a timely manner to user input. It just chugs along, minding IT'S OWN business, ignoring outside requests. That's not really tremendously useful, y'know?

There are a TON of processes for things I never use and never will, but frankly, I don't feel like tracking them all down and disabling them using msconfig. At my age, my time is too valuable to me to be fighting with a recalcitrant chunk of electronics and software that is NOT running the way it should, OR the way it DID before one of those endless "upgrades" happened. Couldn't tell you which one it was; if I knew that, I'd roll it back to pre-update.

For what it might be worth, it's a Dell Inspiron 5755... and I know a whole slew of useless apps, they just keep reloading as soon as I knock them down. Ever play "whack-a-mole?" Again, I never had to do any of this kind of thing pre-unknnown-update, so as far as I'm concerned, Microsoft broke windows, and it's on them to FIX the issue. Or at *least* respond meaningfully to the fact that a LOT of people are having this issue.

Answer 4

Hi Nicholas,

Those are some of the first things I did. The top offenders in the "100% disk use" issue are things I can't shut down, like "System." Windows update spends a lot of time up there, as does Windows Defender and numerous Windows "background tasks" and a bunch of Dell garbage (DataVault, Data collection, others), and it's not always the same offenders like "system;' they come and go, but far too often they tie up the disk to the point of system unusability.

This machine is only two years old, and my wife's only a year, and they're both doing the same thing.

Mine's a Dell Inspiron 5755, 8Gb RAM, Windows 10 Home ver 21H1. It's constantly updating, so I can't be too far behind the curve with running the most recent version, and frankly, the 100% disk use thing didn't start happening until one of the major upgrades installed. A bit leery of upgrades at this point, but of course you can't shut them off, only postpone them.

I've already identified a large number of 'useless' apps... it's the only way I can haul this thing back into line enough to use it. I've also identified a number of processes you *don't* want to end, as it'll cause a system crash. A lot of them are annoying little things, like updating Edge, which I don't use but can't uninstall 'cause Windows won't allow it, MIcrosoft Content, which is just the Microsoft Store, another thing I never use but cant' get rid of, and the real kicker is that even after ending a lot of these processes, they just turn themselves back on while I'm turning something else off. It's like playing whack-a-mole. Immensely frustrating, nobody should have to go through this kind of nonsense just to check email and do a bit of web browsing. I don't have to crawl under the hood of my car more often than not when I need to use it; stick the key in, start it up, and go. That's it. So why does this thing require constant meddling with to make it operable?

Answer 5

Duhhhh... if I could explain why YOUR machine works just fine and MY machine doesn't, I wouldn't be here ragging on Windows now, would I? I'd also be raking money in hand over fist fixing other victim's computers who have the same problem. Google "100% disk use in Windows 10 (or 11, for that matter) and see for yourself. It's a HUGE problem that nobody seems able to get a handle on. My wife's machine needs a solid 20 minutes or more of killing needless processes before it can be used at all. It's one step from totally useless. Keep it up, Microsoft... you're just pushing more and more people to seek alternative operating systems.