2015 HP Laptop - Hard Drive Pegged To 100% during First 10min from Startup

[Chris K-Man]

2015 HP Laptop - Hard Drive Pegged To 100% during First 10min from Startup

Background:

In 2016-17 I took advantage of MS' free OS upgrade to Windows Ten, Home
Basic. Original OS on this machine was Windows 8, which interface-wise
was a hot MESS compared to Vista, 7, and 10 afterwards.

Since then, startups on this laptop have been an eternity.

I did attempt to reduce the pegged HDD(pegged by things like Norton 360,
and Windows internal startup things like Service Hosts, etc) by setting page
files to a fraction of factory/recommended settings, and then restarting.

For a few sessions, startup was much faster, but now had returned to a 10-
20 minute ordeal waiting for my pegged hard disk drive to calm down.

I also ran Auslogics defrag, and Malware Bytes, both clean slates.

Any other suggestions on what to check?

[Paul]

On 7/3/2022 12:10 PM, Chris K-Man wrote:
> 2015 HP Laptop - Hard Drive Pegged To 100% during First 10min from Startup
>
> Background:
>
> In 2016-17 I took advantage of MS' free OS upgrade to Windows Ten, Home Basic. Original OS on this machine was Windows 8, which interface-wise was a hot MESS compared to Vista, 7, and 10 afterwards.
>
> Since then, startups on this laptop have been an eternity.
>
> I did attempt to reduce the pegged HDD(pegged by things like Norton 360, and Windows internal startup things like Service Hosts, etc) by setting page files to a fraction of factory/recommended settings, and then restarting.
>

> For a few sessions, startup was much faster, but now had returned to a 10-20 minute ordeal waiting for my pegged hard disk drive to calm down.

>
> I also ran Auslogics defrag, and Malware Bytes, both clean slates.
>
> Any other suggestions on what to check?
>

Slap an SSD in it, for some relief.

Both of these are rated 600 TBW, which is 600 writes end-to-end of a 1TB sized drive.
For some reason, there are a couple model numbers, implying a flash chip change.

"Samsung 870 EVO Series 1TB 2.5 inch SATA3 SSD MZ-77E1T0E $179"

https://www.newegg.com/samsung-1tb/p/0D9-0009-00AX3?Item=0D9-0009-00AX3

SAMSUNG 870 EVO SATA III SSD 1TB 2.5” Internal SSD MZ-77E1T0B/AM $115

https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-Inch-Internal-MZ-77E1T0B-AM/dp/B08QBJ2YMG

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/870-evo-sata-2-5-ssd-1tb-mz-77e1t0b-am/

There are some cheaper competitor drives at 400 TBW lifespan.

You can uninstall the Auslogics, and use Win10 "Optimize, on weekly schedule"
to take care of the drive. It does a decent job.

The second factor is the CPU, but we can't fix that really.

You could turn off SuperFetch ("SysMain" service), that is, if
it is still running.

Paul