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?

--- Synchronet 3.20a-Win32 NewsLink 1.114

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?
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Win32 NewsLink 1.114

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
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Win32 NewsLink 1.114