Computer slooooow

So the Lenovo all-in-one I have at work is very slow.  It's not a great machine to start with; Win10, 4gb, 1TBHDD, fair processor.  When I open any browser (tried them all) I get about 10 minutes before the HD just starts running constantly and everything freezes.  Wanting to see what was causing it, I hit ctl alt del to get to task manager.  It was 4 minutes before I get the blue screen that says "preparing security options" and another 6 minutes before it opened task manager.  Every time I do this, the memory is at a nice safe 40% or so, but disk is at 98-100%.  But the funny part is, if I scroll down through the disk usage, the most that is being used is 3 mb/s and that top spot is usually superfetch or the browser.  Nearly every other process is using next to nothing.  I have seen the browser process consuming up to 2gb of memory, and that takes the memory to about 75%, but its always the disk that is 98-100%

So I read up on superfetch and how it works.  I didn't think it would help to disable it, and it didn't, but I tried it anyway.  If I close the browser and wait until the HD shuts up I can re-open a browser and continue for about 10 minutes.

Any ideas why my disk goes supernova at such a low load?

Here is a screencap of right now.  I'll post again in a few minutes with the screencap of supernova.

How much ram do you have?  Maybe upgrade to 8 or 12 if you're not there already.  Might do something.  I can't stand power conservation architecture.

Even if it’s not using all the physical memory, 4GB seems awfully little for Win10.  I suspect bumping it to 8 would help tremendously.

Immediately it looks like disk thrashing caused by a fragmented swap file of variable size. If that's the case, a new fixed-size swap file will help. More RAM would also help to some degree, but Windows still has idiotic swap management, and uses the swap file regardless of how much free RAM there is.

Have you done a disk clean up lately? You have to do it twice. 

Once for regular files and then do it over for system files.  The options pop up once you initiate Disk Cleanup.   It may take a while to run if you have a lot trash to clean up.

A guy at work did it and cleaned up something like 60 GB of useless stuff that was hanging on his disk.   Then he did a de-frag.

This sped up his disk response time.

Upgrade to 12gb of ram.

Or tell your boss to grab a good old fashioned full width tower off of ebay.  Off-lease used stuff is dirt cheap for a decent system.  That is what I do for all my family members who need a computer.  Preferably grab a used server, those tend to have 80 gold rated psu's.  Well worth the cost for productivity.  That laptop based all-in-1 stuff is a bunch of crapola.

What Gameboy said.  I have also had a lot of success at work running a program called WIse.  It will clean and defrag your registry which should speed things up as well.

In reply to 8valve :

What's the best way to find one coming off lease on Ebay? 

8valve said:

Upgrade to 12gb of ram.

Or tell your boss to grab a good old fashioned full width tower off of ebay.  Off-lease used stuff is dirt cheap for a decent system.  That is what I do for all my family members who need a computer.  Preferably grab a used server, those tend to have 80 gold rated psu's.  Well worth the cost for productivity.  That laptop based all-in-1 stuff is a bunch of crapola.

This IS the "new" computer.  The old one was running Vista.  I'll see about getting 4 more gb for this one.

There is a local shop in socal that is "eftnetworks" on ebay that has a good size inventory.  Those are my go to guys.  I'm sure there are many other good ones.  Tigerdirect does inexpensive off lease stuff too if you don't like ebay.

Thanks. 

I've got an old laptop with a dying battery. Replacing the battery is probably pointless the laptop is nearly 10 years old, short on ram, quite slow. 

I'd like to donate the computer, but should I keep the Windows Activation info from it in order to use that on another computer?

pheller said:

I'd like to donate the computer, but should I keep the Windows Activation info from it in order to use that on another computer?

OEM Windows install licenses (the type that usually comes with pre-built computers) can't be transferred, so no.

And when you transfer a license, it deactivates the computer that was previously using it.

4GB of RAM is the root cause of your problem. Crucial.com has a tool to help you figure out what kind of RAM you need, use that and then head over to PCPartPicker for pricing.  While you're there, you may also want to explore and see if you can add an SSD - moving your Windows installation over to the SSD will help tremendously.  That said, more RAM is your first priority.