My Windows 10 computer will start freezing up and display (Not Responding) messages at the top of application windows. When it does, the hard drive will be working at 100%. It does this a lot every day.
at least once a day I have to shut down the computer to get out of it. It reminds me of having no RAM and being burdened with virtual memory overload. This machine has 64 GB of RAM and an i7 processor.
I got an email claiming that they have hacked my computer by way of my router and have used my email to send me an email. I think they are full of BS and just spoofed an email to appear as though it was sent from the same account. The things they threaten for blackmail leverage do not exist + camera is covered, I don't have a list of contacts in my email software, I never go to porno sites, etc. I get the impression they are Eastern European or Russian using a VPN. I doubt if this recent email has anything to do with it.
I have updated Windows, Updated Norton and run it with a Full System Scan, and defragged the hard drive with UltraDefrag. I have more than 1 million files but I still have 1.61 TB out of 1.81 TB of space left. It seems like this has gotten worse over time. I use to think that this OS and the applications were unable to take advantage of all that RAM I have in here. This has been going on for a long time. I spent about $2200 on this Windows laptop expecting it to be the fastest one I have ever had, but with this problem it is the slowest. It came with Windows 10.
I see from a Google search that others have had similar symptoms they attribute to Windows 10.
I have not detected anything and Norton runs automatically daily.
That was not a good example of the issue. Disk usage was only 33% but it was still somewhat frozen. You cannot actually get a timely screenshot of the issue because if it is happening, you will not be able to do anything on the computer.
That didn't work. I wonder why they have that feature if it is not going to function? You can view the image in your browser at 100% scale here: http://sungraffix.net/000misc/Task_Manager.Screenshot.Freeze_Issue.jpg
I will try "inserting an HTML code snippit."
<div style="width: 895; height: 900px;"><img src="http://sungraffix.net/000misc/Task_Manager.Screenshot.Freeze_Issue.jpg" style="text-align: center; width: auto;" alt="Task Manager Screenshot"></div>
I will take a look and see if there are possible remedies I have not already tried. I have seen articles like that before. They were also through Microsoft support. They had different remedies. I also have what was advertised as a gaming laptop computer with 64GB of RAM and top shelf video and audio, two mechanical hard drives and two solid state hard drives. I only have the one, 2TB, internal hard drive and I do have two external hard drives... one is 3TB and the other is 8TB.
I must wonder if the new Windows 10 OS may have other built in behaviors that might cause this problem if the auto defrag is turned off. If so, it might be very hard to impossible to determine that unless Microsoft has already determined that. You would think they must have, at least by the time they built in the capability to turn it off... however, that would likely be something that would require experimentation since putting two and two, or more, together could easily require it.
WR, please have a look at this Microsoft article. There have been issues like yours for some time now and it offers several suggestions as possible solutions. Most times a driver is the cause when its not 100% compatible. Do a check for your chipset drivers from your manufacturers site and install their latest. Reboot and see if things change. Microsoft has gooned several updates this year and it may be one of their driver updates is the cause.
Norton does indeed use the built in Windows tool to optimize / defrag drives as Krusty13 posted and an alternate software solution isn't needed. Open an elevated (run as admin) command prompt and run the following command: sfc/scannow. Allow the system to scan, find and replace any corrupted system files. Reboot when done to see if the issue persists.
Your original post stated you have a large hard drive on the system. Does there happen to be an SSD installed as the boot drive?
Cheers
Norton uses the built in Windows tool to optimise / defrag drives.
I turned off the Windows auto defrag feature so the OS would not be constantly working on that and putting more age on the hard drive. I use, or purchased, UltraDefrag because of this issue which includes the intense hard drive activity as part of the cause. I otherwise use Norton 360, which runs automatically on a regular basis, to "optimize" the hard drive. Rather than doing it constantly, it waits until the hard drive reaches a certain level of fragmentation. Perhaps there are other behaviors built into the new Windows 10 OS that trigger my issue if the auto defrag is turned off in spite of the fact that the hard drive never gets very fragmented thanks to Norton...?
Hello WR. From what I am reading regarding "UltraDefrag" is really concerning. From this source comes this statement:
UltraDefrag is a disk defragmenter for Windows, which supports defragmentation of locked system files by running during the boot process.
If you are running Windows 10 as I suspect you are, defragging / registry cleaning on Windows 10 is not needed nor suggested. Windows 10 has built in programs that monitor those on a continuing basis. If I may suggest, set your UltraDefrag configuration NOT to scan your system and locked system files during boot time (if it is indeed set). Reboot and let us know if things change for you. You may also want to disable "fast startup" in your system power settings as well since it can cause issues due to not getting a complete system memory data release and clean shutdowns/restarts.
Cheers
I don't see how I could insert an image here, but I can attach it.
The link in my last post describes how to post images in the forum. You only need the section of the screen that shows the task manager.
Thanks for your reply! One problem with getting a screenshot when it starts doing this is that the problem is the computer "freezing up" because of it. However, if it starts again I will try to catch it early on, open the Task Manager, and get a look and a screenshot of it. Sometimes it will begin by acting up briefly a few times before it gets paralyzed completely. I can run the screenshots through Adobe Photoshop. I don't see how I could insert an image here, but I can attach it. I see that I could use HTML, but it might present rather small in this framework. When and if it happens, I will try that.
Thank You
Regarding that email. It is a know sextortion scam. See this information from Bleeping Computer https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-sextortion-scam-pretends-to-come-from-your-hacked-email-account/
Your slow system issues should not be related to this email.
When you see the drive at 100%, what process is using the highest amount of the hard drive use? A screenshot of the task manager can help us see what is happening.
Instructions to post screenshots can be found here
https://community.norton.com/forums/how-post-image-forums-0