My computer is showing 98% disk usage but when I look in the task manager almost nothing is showing (certainly not anything of significance). Any suggestions as to what might be causing this?
Also, this occurred directly after a restart, before which my computer was acting very strangely, flicking quickly between different screens and registering keys I was not touching (there in no damage to the keyboard and it's working fine now). Also, bizarrely, after the restart iCloud loaded itself up and prompted me to login, but to my recollection I have never installed iCloud and have certainly never seen the login screen for it on startup before (although perhaps this was added when updating or installing another program???).
32 Answers
The Disk% in Task Manager represents I/O load, not throughput. If a process is sending many small read/write requests to the disk, it fills the I/O buffer even though it is transferring a very small amount of data.
That svchost process in your screenshot is definitely worth looking into. You can check to see which services the process is hosting by issueing the following command:tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq svchost.exe" /svc
You can match the process ID in your list with what Task Manager says and that will give you a good clue as to what service is causing the problem.
You can also use DiskMon and Process Monitor from Sysinternals for additional sleuthing.
1This is the superfetch service that reads data from your HDD which Windows detected that you will likely use them later. It runs at very low IO priority so it should not impact the performance of the Windows when you see the activity.
