new hp laptop hard disk running at or near 100 % consistently

[residroof]

Bought my wife a new hp laptop for christmass model 15-cc152
Only about 20 hrs use, hard disk always running at 95 to 100 %
makes it sluggish and unresponsive
did full recovery, windows updates, no help
hp tech support said hd is good, passed tests
I'm lost
If this is its best, I must take the loss
any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated

 

[smashjohn]

My initial thoughts are this:

Laptops often ship with crappy 5400rpm hard drives because they are cheap and use low power. And of course low power = low performance, so everything takes longer. If this is the case you can improve your performance by upgrading to an SSD.

Laptops also tend to ship with a ton of bloatware installed. This is all the software that comes with the machine when you buy it and loads at startup; you probably don't need or want most of it. You can gain back a lot of performance by uninstalling anything you don't use. It's hard to tell you "what you need", but in general anything you can uninstall from the control panel is safe to uninstall. A track pad will generally work without special track pad software installed, but you might lose multi-gesture support. Also, anything that you uninstall and decide you want later, can probably be reinstalled.

This combination of factors will definitely create the situation you're in.

 

[webworkings]

When you look in "Task Manager" what items show as using the most of the resources?

I would make sure what what is running is what you want running. So check the "DISK" tab and a also the "Processes" tab. This will let you know what is actually running and using all your resources.

If you can't find anything in there, then next I would try turning off your antivirus software and see if this makes things run better.

My next suggestion would be to clean up junk files, however you said you actually did a full recovery, which should have removed everything and brought the computer back to its original state. If, however that isn't the case, then I would try cleaning up junk files, etc., in "Cleanup and Optimization". Which is basically "Disk Cleanup".

Should none of this fix it, then I would be contacting the manufacturer again and get them to actually listen. To do this you may need to go a step or two above the initial customer service rep. Don't hesitate to ask for a higher tech or even a supervisor.

 

[Solandri]

When you look in "Task Manager" what items show as using the most of the resources?

I would make sure what what is running is what you want running. So check the "DISK" tab and a also the "Processes" tab. This will let you know what is actually running and using all your resources.

Actually, there is no Disk tab in Task Manager. You have to go to the Performance Tab, and click Open Resource Manager. That will open up a new monitoring program which has a Disk tab.

Under "Processes with Disk Activity" it'll show you each process using the disk, and how much data it's reading, writing, and total (read + write). You can click on these columns to sort them. Try clicking the Total column and look at which processes are hitting the drive the hardest. Then you can work on figuring out which program is responsible for that process and fixing the problem or disabling it.

In my experience, the most common culprits are:

• 
  ■Insufficient RAM. You're out of memory and the computer is swapping memory pages to the disk. You can see how much RAM is being used in Task Manager's Performance tab.
  ■Windows Update (shows up as svhost.exe, though lots of other things show up as svhost.exe). It'll grind the disk hard while figuring out if you need new updates. It'll continue to grind it after an update if the update needs you to reboot the computer. Dunno why it does this since the update is ready, just waiting for you to reboot so it can install. There should be no reason for it to continue to thrash the disk, but it does. When I "finish" installing updates on a new computer, I usually do a few extra cycles of checking for new updates and rebooting when it's finished just to be sure it's actually finished. Sometimes it won't find new updates until after you've rebooted following installing previous updates. Only if I can reboot twice with it finding no new updates do I consider the update process truly finished.
  ■Adobe Acrobat. The auto-updater for this (either free reader or full program) occasionally it gets into a state where it's perpetually downloading an update (can consume all the bandwidth on a slow Internet connection) and constantly thrashes the disk. Unfortunately the updater is pervasive, almost like malware, and manages to come back to life even after I explicitly disable it. So simply disabling it (so it'll only update when you explicitly tell it to update) is often not enough. You may need to uninstall and reinstall Acrobat. I try to convince clients to use an alternative like Foxit Pro, but some of them need to use Acrobat for guaranteed 100% compatibility.
  ■Virus and malware scans. These have to check every file on the disk, so will peg HDD use at 100%. Some of them are not very forthcoming about when they're running a scan. So your computer will "mysteriously" have the HDD pegged at 100% use for part of the day (for anti-virus which scans daiily).
  ■Overzealous security apps. Usually are integrated with an anti-virus app. The purport to keep you safe by actively scanning any files you open. What ends up happening is every time the computer needs to access a file, this scan kicks in resulting in the disk thrashing for a few seconds before the file can be opened. On a slow HDD, this can cause the disk to fall behind on access requests, resulting in it permanently thrashing. Windows Defender has this feature as an option, and it occasionally gets turned on.
  ■Malware. Constantly thrashing disk is one of the symptoms that you've got ransomware that's busy encrypting your drive.

 

[residroof]

My initial thoughts are this:

Laptops often ship with crappy 5400rpm hard drives because they are cheap and use low power. And of course low power = low performance, so everything takes longer. If this is the case you can improve your performance by upgrading to an SSD.

Laptops also tend to ship with a ton of bloatware installed. This is all the software that comes with the machine when you buy it and loads at startup; you probably don't need or want most of it. You can gain back a lot of performance by uninstalling anything you don't use. It's hard to tell you "what you need", but in general anything you can uninstall from the control panel is safe to uninstall. A track pad will generally work without special track pad software installed, but you might lose multi-gesture support. Also, anything that you uninstall and decide you want later, can probably be reinstalled.

This combination of factors will definitely create the situation you're in.

 

[residroof]

understand
there is a lot of processes running
I will work on this and post any results

 

[residroof]

there are 20 hp programs in the control panel
This is just after recovery, no downloads

 

[smashjohn]

Sounds about right. It's too bad they don't provide a "minimal recovery" option. All that software can do cool stuff, but it's pointless if it bogs the computer down to such a non-functional level. And yet, this is common practice among all manufacturers.

 

[residroof]

My dell laptop is running at cpu 7 ram 45 disk 1
Its a 2 year old laptop with a 40 gig ssd
New HP cpu 3 ram 25 disk 100 non stop
hd is 5400 1 terabyte

they both run most of the same processes
The HP is clean just did a recovery and windows updates
removed most hp programs from control panel

I thought of putting my own windows 10 OS but I dont think this will help
Thinking of dumping this computer at a loss
I've owned many computers and built a quite a few.
Biggest piece of junk I have ever seen
I think it is the rotten HD but it passed the diagnostics done with a HP tech

 

[vadja72]

check out Task Scheduler. They could set up some unwanted tasks there...

 

[quabba]

if its an HP laptop, make sure you have uninstalled HP Coolsense. This has caused issues in a few pcs in my office and this fixed it

 

[ainulibadsyed]

Hello guys I also faced the same problem when I bought my laptop few days ago, so went back to the dealership outlet, the guy working there told that it happens due to windows update, so what I did was simply went through full recovery and then when all things were reinstalled, I simply went into services and from there disabled windows update, superfetch and windows search, but keep that in mind that computer shouldn't be connected to internet before this operation