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This is getting ridiculous, I recently went out and built myself a moderate gaming machine, not a big-rig by any means, but something that could get the job done, but it seems I made the mistake of using windows 8. I'm constantly at 65% + CPU usage, around 90% memory usage, and 95%+ DISK Usage, and I don't have a clue where it's coming from.

Giving it the benefit of the doubt that the task-manager is just buggy, it's claiming that running it alone is using 53.6% of my CPU, granted my CPU is a Quad-Core 4.3GHz processor. My memory is at 91% right now and when showing resource values, the thing using the most is Skype at a whopping 62.3MB (Ridiculous right? Not.) Disk usage is currently at 100%, with the task using the most being System at a whopping 0.4Mb/s, and only 5 more tasks running at 0.1Mb/s for a total of.. 0.9Mb/s (Holy crap, how could my hard-drive ever keep up?)

I've been reading around, this seems to be a common problem for windows 8, however here is what is REALLY bothering me.

Doing the addition, the total memory that is being used right now is 571.6MB I have 4GBs of RAM. Anybody else see an issue here?

I have a 1TB Sata drive as-well.

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    I can guarantee you this either is a service that is being started causing the problem or is a hardware problem, in both cases the problem has very little to do with Windows 8. Most of those reports are from people who simply do not understand how to figure out what is causing the problem and blame "Windows 8" for their problems. I have used Windows 8 daily, I am a power user, and have had no problems at all with Windows 8.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 27, 2013 at 13:47
  • You've provided very little specific details about your hardware. Please edit your question to include what hardware exactly you are using, not just its parameters. (btw, 4 GB RAM is a reasonable amount for a low-end laptop, not moderate gaming PC)
    – gronostaj
    Sep 27, 2013 at 13:50
  • SATA3 has the ability to support much faster then 1.5Mb/sec ( 6.0 Gbit/s to be percise ). You would have to go to SATA1 drivers to even get close ( not really ) to limit ( 1.5Gbit/sec ). There is more going on then the default Task Manager is showing.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 27, 2013 at 13:51
  • @Ramhound I'd vote that first comment up 10000 times if I could, and apply it to every OS. :)
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Sep 27, 2013 at 14:21
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    post some pictures of taskmgr and resource monitor.
    – magicandre1981
    Sep 27, 2013 at 18:56

1 Answer 1

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Lets separate the issues here:

The problem can be with:

  1. The hardware.
  2. The OS core.
  3. Installed drivers.
  4. Installed software (both useful stuff or malware)

Solving 1

You can rule out hardware problems by booting another OS. Simply download one of the many liveCDs or their USB pendrive variants and boot from that.

Do the symptoms persist?
If they do that it is not a win8 problem.
If they do not then something on your win8 side is causing problems.

Solving 2

(Note: I recommend doing step 3 and 4 first.)

Discovering if windows 8 somehow has a problem with your OS can be done with a clean installation of windows. Do not install extra drivers. Do not install any programs. Even unplug the network cable. Just install a clean bare win8 from a win8 DVD.

To be more detailed: If it is the win8 side:

  1. Get working (tested) windows 8 installation DVD/pendrive.
  2. Optionally backup your old system.
  3. Reformat the old drive wiping any possible malware traces. Then do a clean installation.

If the problem persist then it is time to contact Microsoft. However I really doubt that it it. MS bashing is fun, but they actually do a quite good job at testing their OS before it gets released.

On the rare chance that it is slow let it sit there for a few hours. It might be busy with file indexing or rebuilding .dot packages.

And yes, Hours. As in multiple hours. .net stuff can be remarkably slow after an update and I do not know if this also applies to a clean win8 installation. For reference, updating .net 1.1, .net 2 and .net 3 on an old XP installation on a Dell lattitude C (40GB IDE disk, celeron 900MHz) took about 4 hours with maxed out disk and high CPU usage). Needless to say with 512MB the RAM was also full).

Solving 3 & 4

Installed drivers can either work bad or crash. One of the worst cases would be where it crashes as a service and then immediately gets restarted. That would cause high CPU usage. It would not explain high disk IO though.

The same is true for other programs.

To test for this go to the evenviewer (start, run, eventvwr.msc). Open the [Windows logs[ and check Application and System. If there are errors then please add them to your post.

OK, that leaves a few more things:

Malware: Are you sure that you are not infected? A new system often means a lot of extra programs which get installed. Are all of those from safe sources?

Disk: Are any S.M.A.R.T. errors logged? That should not explain high CPU usage, but it would explain a very slow disk and thus a slow system. Usually this gets detected when a disk has some internal problems, causing it to use all of its time to solve that (rereading the sector until it succeeds, using 100% of the disk time but without much IO).

Memory: 4GB RAM is not much these days and it should be full. Memory which is not in use might as well be in a desktop drawer or still at the shop. Every modern OS is aware of this and uses normally unused memory as a cache, leaving only a little part 'free' for immediate usage. I have no handy link to explain this for windows, but Linux used to use this caching trick before windows did and people paniced. Hence website such as these which explain things. There information is true for both Linux, Windows and other modern OS's

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  • From my experience, on Windows "used RAM" means the amount allocated for programs and doesn't include what's used for caching. (for example right now I have 3.4 GB used out of 6 GB, that's far from full and everything is working normally; I've never seen Windows consuming entire RAM until some app allocated it)
    – gronostaj
    Sep 27, 2013 at 13:47
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    I downloading Process Explorer technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx as a required tool to determine the root cause of your problems.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 27, 2013 at 13:49
  • @gronostaj - You want Windows to use your memory for a cache if it wants to, your unused memory, is sort of useless. Now you want enough to be free in order to fit everything in memory that needs to be, thus allowing Windows, to readjust the cache to a smaller amount but thats another story.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 27, 2013 at 14:26

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