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Details of problem: Hey guys, i am currently experiencing a set of problems i do not understand. Two things happen and they might be connected. One, sometimes when i start the PC i hear the hard drive running for minutes and minutes and nothing is executable. No thread is using my processor, my ram is idling around, but my SATA is at 100% stopping everything else from loading. Second problem is that svchost is running one cpu core at 100% with windowsupdateservice, effectively killing CPU 1 and bringing the system to a grinding stop as well.
Solutions and measures conducted: The first thing i did, as i expected updates to be the problem, was to forbid windows update to download stuff automatically. Windows is allowed to search but do nothing else. This did not work. Then i searched the internet and found two fixes by microsoft adressing this:
KB3161664 and KB3125574
It's supposed to fix the issue with svchost an the windows update service to search too long for updates. The internet said i should do this, this thread:
http://superuser.com/questions/821032/svchost-exe-high-memory-usage-wuauserv
So now it is back though and i am lost. I use AVG, which wanted a reboot right now, but after i told it to wait the system is still blocked. Currently the resourcemanager for the hard drives is saying that my data-sata-hdd is writing with 4mb/s and 100% activity, the sound of the hdd has been there for an hour with nothing happening, the processor is bored with 3% steam (after i killed svchost) and occasional other stuff. I just have no idea how to proceed.
Recent changes to hardware/software Oculus rift, but no change in behavior.
System specs
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Intel i5-4670 AMD Radeon R9 290 16GB DDR3 2133 (I think) 250 GB SSD Harddrive for OS 450 GB S-ATA Harddrive for games No Idea what the power plant is
Any idea what this is? Can i shut windows update down for good, actually only installing and downloading when i want? Is it something else?
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United Kingdom20145 Posts
You can see the Disk queue length on resource monitor and this is an important stat, it's normal for it to be high for a while (2-5 minutes) after booting from a HDD.
You can kill the windows update service in task manager to stop that other issue, it'll come back on next PC restart
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I haven't found the Disk queue length in the resource monitor yet, no idea how to activate it. I am super frustrated but as the problem usually is gone by waiting for some time it went off my radar again. Now it has peaked again, i am organising a LAN-Party tomorrow and my PC does not start anymore. Yesterday the system started and proceeded to block everything from happening by blocking one core with svchost.exe, being at 100% disk usage and stuff like media player or internet videos are not able to run fluently. After i killed the processtree of svchost.exe, windows bootet because the energyservice obviously was killed as well. Great. Booting suddenly took 10 minutes of disknoise, nothing happening, so i forced several reboots (not so clever but impatient) and the third try or so resulted in a normal boot, taking 15 seconds. So i disabled windows update, as this supposedly helps and (the system is still megaslow, svchost is running) i try to check on the oculus as i want to show it around tomorrow and it brings up an error msg everytime it tries to start. So i restart windows once more but this time i try to let windows do whatever it does. After 1 hour, it still hasn't booted yet. I hear the computer grinding stones and i let it do that as i need to go to work. WTF is that?
I even tried to reach windows support, which is the biggest joke i have witnessed in support so far and i work in support, i know support. Please be able to tell me exactly what the problem is, i don't want to format the shit out of this and i don't want to call that wretched hotline again.
Please please please.
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United Kingdom20145 Posts
Can't say for sure or even with very high certainty but it looks like HDD is dead/dying. Typical symptoms and hard drives die more regularly than most other components. If you can boot (or put the HDD in another system to check it) then there are tools that display the SMART data from a drive which can show some problems
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HEy again, i was somehow able to work with the system in the last week, after trying a solution from microsoft to get rid of corrupt windows updates. However, the problem is now back in action. While the windowsupdate service is still taking one complete core and not doing anything, the real problem seems to be completely different.
I disconnected my data hdd and the system started wihout any problems in 3 seconds, responded and worked just fine. Once i plugged in my 500 MB SATA again, we were back to a complete halt. The disk is always running an it seems like it's limited in speed by something. I tried to copy my download and music folder on my os-ssd to wipe the sata, but it would only do so with speeds below 1 MB/s. So i ran Seatools and everything is green. Today the systems has basically been dead for about 4 hours. I can run browsers without problems, i am watching a movie right now, but the second i am trying to play a game or something like that, the performance completely dies. The thing is, there are days where everything works just fine.
Is there a tool that shows hdd traffic, i still believe that something is holding me back rather then that my sata is sporadically dying.
Edit: i just did the fast repair on the drive and afterwards, the system is back to normal speed. I'll have to see if this solved something or helped only temporarily...
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There is a good free HDD monitoring and statistical program out there called "HDDSENTINEL" , download it and check out your drives but you should back up important information, the drive may be dying. Otherwise it sounds like a corrupt windows update, maybe you can use system restore to go back to before you started doing the corrupt update.
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Thanks, i will try that next time it occures and shove some stuff on my SSD for the time being.
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You don't need to wait until it behaves suspicious again. You can use it right now. The drive itself counts errors it ran into in the past, and the program can show you what the drive reports.
Here's the Wikipedia article about the stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
That article has a long list about possible entries you might see in the table of stats that your drive will report. The entries you'll want to look at are highlighted with a red background in that Wikipedia article. Those are the only ones you have to look out for.
Or you could show a screenshot of what you see with that suggested "HDD sentinel" tool. There's also other tools that show this "SMART" record of the drive, for example "Defraggler" and "Crystal Disk Info", and people here could then tell you what they think about it.
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