Mystery program is pegging the hard drive

[TNesler 0]

Hello!

I have a puzzle I am hoping  you can help me with.  I own a Lenovo laptop with Win10 home.  I use Malwarebytes and Webroot as my antivirus products. (Don't shoot me!  I will be happy to switch to Adaware if you can show me that switching would fix the problem.)  Over the last 6 months, I have noticed my computer's hard drive will flail away at times (usually in the evening) and my performance shows to such a crawl, that I have to do a hard shutdown and then start over.  I am not running anything except a browser most of the times this happens.  I have tried to open Task Manager but usually I can't do this or any other diagnostic work.  Once I was able to get into Task manager but I could not see what service or programming was causing my hard drive to max out.  I got an SSD test program and it shows my SSD is doing fine.  I downloaded Adaware and FRST and ran them.  They did not show any infections.  I am wondering if my PC is being hijacked as a BOT when this is happening.

What do you think is happening and what do you recommend?  I can provide the logs if you wish.

Thanks!

[CeciliaB 475]

Hi TNesler,

I suggest that you have the Resource Monitor with the Disk tab open at all times and as soon that you notice any issues, you switch over to it and checks if you can see anything unusual.

Can you describe with more details what happens when "hard drive will flail away"?
Is the hard drive the same device as the SSD or have you one SSD and one mechanical hard disk?
Have you checked in the Task Manager, Processes tab, how much CPU and Memory the browser is using?
I suggest that you do that every 10th minute in the evenings.

[TNesler 0]

Thanks for the suggestion.  My problem so far is that once the system starts slowing down, my ability to call up any monitoring program is gone.  Once I got the Task manager program up and it showed, "Task Manager not responding"...:-(  When I say my hard drive is flailing I mean that the fan cooling my laptop starts running full blast.  I believe it is my hard drive only because I see the hard drive at 100% when I have my task manager running.

I only have an SSD (256 Gigabytes). 

[CeciliaB 475]

You're welcome.

I think that a program has a bug that causes the  program to run in a loop, then the program uses the CPU (near) 100 %, the CPU gets hot and the fan needs to work at full speed to cool the CPU. When the CPU is very busy, it's almost impossible to start another program.

It's difficult to find which program that is the culprit and how to fix it. You might try to have the browser (or other programs that you're using) in a smaller window and have the Task Manager (Processes tab sorted by CPU usage) in a very narrow window next to it, so you can try to see when CPU activity starts to rise and which program/process that uses the CPU at that moment.

[TNesler 0]

OK...I am planning on uninstalling all my cloud oriented programs as well.  Such as Google sync, DropBox,.  Google Sync makes me suspicious...:-)

I will let you know how it  turns out.

Thanks!

 

[CeciliaB 475]

You're welcome
Yes, please keep me informed since that can be useful for someone else.