Ever since I updated to Windows 11, the computer has been super slow because disk usage is always at 100%. It's using a ton of resources for nothing and I couldn't figure out which process is causing it. I already tried disabling indexing but it's still the same.
It could be Windows Update running in the background, your antivirus doing a heavy scan, or even your disk has a physical problem.
Try opening Task Manager, go to Processes, click on "Disk" to sort it and see which app is eating up the most, then you kill it or uninstall it.
If it keeps happening randomly, run a chkdsk (like this: open command prompt as admin and type "chkdsk C: /F") because it might be that your hard drive is failing.
Windows 11 is pretty resource-hungry, yeah, but 100% constant usage isn't normal - usually something specific is running. Task Manager is the way to go, yes, but instead of just looking at the processes, open the "Performance" tab and then click on "Disk" there. That'll show you a real-time graph and you can identify which process is hammering the disk at that moment. A lot of times it's invisible stuff like Windows Update, antivirus doing a scan, or even superfetch/prefetch that sometimes goes crazy on slower drives.
Now, here's a trick a lot of people don't do: disable "Superfetch" (or "SysMain" on Windows 11) because that service loves constantly reading from the disk, especially right after an update. Go to Services (type services.msc in the start menu), search for "SysMain", right-click it, Properties, and change the startup type to "Disabled". Restart your PC and see if anything changes.
If it stays the same, do a quick test: open Task Manager, go to the "Startup" tab and disable everything you don't really need to launch with Windows. Sometimes there's background software that got installed somewhere that you don't even know exists. And yeah, if nothing works, it could be that the disk is actually starting to have issues - a dying disk usually gets stuck at 100% constantly. In that case, you'd need to think about an urgent backup. 😅
Constant 100% usually points to something specific, it's not just Windows being greedy. Before you start messing with processes, try running `chkdsk /f` (restart your PC after) because a fragmented disk or bad sectors cause exactly this - it keeps trying to read the same thing over and over and never gets a break.
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