100% Disk operations in Windows 10: Fix

[Jason]

I don't spend a lot of time in Windows 10 so it particularly annoys me when it freezes or becomes so slow to be unusable. Usually, I just Windows as a backup system in case Linux becomes unusable (which has never happened to me ever) or gaming - where I call it Wintendo.

Recently, Windows 10 started becoming so unresponsive that I'd click on something, a button, a menu option, anything really, and it could take 20-30 seconds to respond to the click, if it even responded it at all. It would frequently just ignore clicks altogether. Most people, who are not as brilliant as I ,  would just assume the system was frozen.

I opened Task Manager (which itself took a while to open pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del repeatedly) and found that under the Performance tab, Disk usage (activity usage not storage space) on my main drive (where Windows and programs run from) was at 100%. Checking under processes, Backup was the culprit. Killing it made the system responsive again. Since I use an automatic backup setup, every time I'd boot, I'd have to go through this crap again.

After some searching, I found this to be the fix. After rebooting after applying this registry patch, all is good in the universe again. I specifically chose to run Backup in case it wasn't running and the system didn't become unresponsive.

Here's the same fix but more graphically-oriented.

I just wanted to pass this on in case anybody else was experiencing the same issue. It took me an hour to find a solution that actually worked.

[fox]

Thanks for posting that, Jason. I don't have anything backing up my Windows partition on my xps; I pretty much use it only to update it, and to run income tax software. But good to know. What do you back it up to?

[Jason]

Thanks for posting that, Jason. I don't have anything backing up my Windows partition on my xps; I pretty much use it only to update it, and to run income tax software. But good to know. What do you back it up to?

I back up the entire Windows system and data to my hardware RAID 10 array which has 4 TB total storage across 4 SATA drives and data only to the cloud using SpiderOak One Backup. I do the same with Linux using TimeShift for system backups and SpiderOak again (data-only). Both Windows and Linux OSes and programs run off my SSD drive for maximum performance, it's just the backups that go to the SATA drives besides videos and virtual machines since those tend to be quite large files.

I have yet to find a good data backup for Linux - KBackup seemed fine except that I can't figure out how to enable automatic backups - I keep having to initiate them. I was using Timeshift for it but it's not really recommended for data backups so I'm trying to find something else. I might just end up writing a short shell script that uses rsync.

RAID arrays take multiple disks and treats them like a single disk. Except for RAID 0, you lose storage to gain redundancy. In my case, I have 4x2 TB drives in a RAID 10 setup which means I get 4 TB total storage. I use two equally-sized partitions, one for Windows, one for Linux. You can read more about RAID here.