100% Activity Time causes computer to hang?

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slicer800

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Aug 15, 2013
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Hi guys, Currently i'm experiencing some problems with my computer in which i think it's a hard drive issue. If you guys think otherwise it would help me a lot to figure out what the real cause of this problem is. It is one that has me baffled for a few weeks now i been researching and came up with some answers but i would like to make sure. My computer for weeks has been hanging non stop. For example programs will not respond and things pop up saying this is not responding do you want to end. The hangs occur at random times and for about 1-3 mins. It very frustrating to to anything because of the hangs. Even Google chrome does not respond. I have tried many different browsers all had the same outcome. So slowly i thought it might be a RAM issue but since my CPU never reaches about 60% even while playing games. I also thought it could be a hard drive issue because my activity time is constantly 100% even when my brothers computer and my fathers computer never stay that high for more than a second. After a week or so i thought i could fix it by restoring my labtop to factory default so i did that but the problem still persisted so now i think it is a hardware issue but i don't know which it is my hard drive or RAM or neither of them. Is there some sort of test where i could totally isolate the problem? This happens with games too. I even tried game booster to see if i was short on memory but it had very little effect or if any at all.
Currently i have a HP Dv6 Pavillion labtop for about 3 years now and i my hard drive file type is NFTS. Also i currently have no viruses i scanned and no malware slowing my computer down.

Thanks,
Chris


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luckiest charm

luckiest charm

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Jun 1, 2013
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I guess you have encountered a 'Worm'.
No that is not earthworm or anything similar to that, its sort of virus.

What it does is that it constantly multiplies in your hard drive. It makes HDD slow, fills all sectors, and does nothing else.
It does not spy or do anything like that, but just makes PC slow and causes lot of hangs (As in your case).

Now this is a virus which no antivirus can remove as it constantly multiplies. In that case, only 1 alternative is left, completely format all your HDD partitions and install Windows on 1 of them. Start from scratch. You would loose everything in your PC but you need to loose that data as it might be infected which would cause trouble after the format (due to multiplication again).

In simpler terms, do as following -

1) Insert Windows Disc
2) Set it as primary booting device
3) Restart and get windows setup going
4) When it comes to hard disk partition selecting, click one of the drives --> drive tools --> Format
5) Do this for all other drives and that would get your whole HDD formatted
6) Install windows again

Easy thing to get rid of all such errors and to make sure its hardware causing issues which is very unlikely because normally a HDD only crashes (And needs a replacement).
There are 90% chances its Worms which are keeping HDD active for so long.

However keep in mind that any other process may also do so. If something is being written to hard disk, being copied, being moved, being deleted or simply being edited, hard disk usage % will go high till that process is running and would be directly proportional to its data transfer speeds.

----------

Edit - Do one more thing.

Open Task Manager, click "Disk" (Where you see high percentage) on top. That would get things sorted to max using process to least using process. List all the processes which are using more than 10% of your HDD. Then we should be able to give you more info on what is causing the trouble and if we find anything unnecessary, we can simply end it and stop it from starting up at windows startup.
 
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slicer800

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Aug 15, 2013
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hmm i find that hard to believe honestly, because one of too things i scanned with 3 anti viruses and nothing came up everytime and because i factory restored my computer which deleted everything as stated above. How can i still have a virus? o_O

Edit.

Also did you mean "disk" in resource monitor?

If so there are three rows of data which do i show you?
 
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slicer800

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Aug 15, 2013
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Edit:



i'm running windows 7 and i can't seem to find disk when i right click my taskbar. it just says start task manger, toolbars, show desktop, cascade windows, show windows stacked, show windows side by side, lock task bar, properties. i don't understand where disk is when i right click my taskbar.
 
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slicer800

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Aug 15, 2013
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Yea it's been a while since i last posted here because i been busy with school and other things, but yeah i re installed windows and i still have the computer hang. Although it's more of things not responding when running and i don't really know what the problem is now. i'm still thinking my hard drive needs a replacement. or could it be other things?
 
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Sxilderik

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Dec 31, 2007
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I have the same problem

I have a old PC, built on a ASUS P5QL-EM motherboard, with 4GB of RAM, running happily WinXP for years.

Win XP have been acting up lately, with the symptom being temporary freezes.

I installed Win7 on a new partition of the drive, and the problem was the same.

As I suspected a hard drive issue, I removed the old drive, plugged a brand new one, and installed Win7 on that drive... and the problem still exists!

Using System Monitor, I notice the Activity stays at 100% for several minutes while nothing happens at all, same problem I have seen in many posts all over the web but never a definitive solution.

The virtual memory on WinXP was set at a specific size.

The SATA configuration on that MB was IDE, I might try using AHCI for the sake of trying something, but I'm clueless

I'm installing Linux on a new partition, suspecting this being a Windows problem, to make sure this is the case.

Help appreciated !
 
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Hunnie

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Apr 27, 2014
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Were you able to find a solution to this problem on Windows? I have also been facing this problem since past few weeks now. . . .strange thing was that this drive was working fine before (When there was less data on it?) . . . .

This is a new HDD (<6 months old) and the only thing that i can say has changed for the drive in the past few weeks (upto the run up to this problem) is that there is more data saved on the drive than before now. . . Reinstalling Windows did not help.

Does this problem have anything to do with the amount of data stored on it? This really is a strange issue, a drive should either work or not work. . . . .

The problematic Drive is a new Seagate Barracuda 4TB capacity with two 2TB NTFS partitions. Since drive capacity is more than 2TB it has been formatted using the GPT partition style. 0% fragmentation.

I suspect this problem has something to do with the way WIndows OS is communicating with the underlying platform? . . . . Running CHKDSK /f /v/ /b /r (multiple times) also did not help. Neither is the BIOS setting to "IDE" (NOT ACHI) solving the problem.

Also just FYI - i did a quick format of the drive and there were no problems after the format was done. . . .however when i ran a file restoration utility (Recuva) on the drive partition or even started to fill it up with data again, i am seeing the 100% Active time problem again.
 
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