For some reason, in the last few months I've been dealing with a spate of systems that are running slowly for no apparent reason.

I go through my normal routine of virus scans, disabling startup items, chkdsk, and other standard stuff, but it's still slow.

Pretty soon I started noticing something on the "Performance" tab in task manager. I've never really paid much attention to the disk usage meter because it's never been an issue before, but now I'm seeing all these instances of the disk getting pegged at 100% non-stop. Never letting up from the moment the computer is booted to the moment it's shut down.

I've done an absurd amount of research on this, and for the most part there have been a dozen suspected culprits, but I've settled on two:

Superfetch

This one is annoying because even on pages where people are insisting that it's the culprit, everyone is telling them to keep it turned on at all costs. I get that it's supposed to vastly increase performance by predicting user needs and loading things from RAM instead of the drive. But here's the thing. I've now seen three computers in the last two weeks where turning this service off decreases the disk usage immediately and permanently. The result is a computer that seems to work pretty normally. I think these people are all living in hypothetical land instead of the real world, but if you can think of a reason that I should re-enable this service on these computers, let me know, because it sure seemed to fix the problem.

Notifications

This one is weirder to me. I've now seen several Windows 10 computers where this helps. Under Start > Settings > System > Notifications, disabling all of them suddenly makes the disk usage go down to normal levels. I have no idea why this is the case, but it's worked for me.


I'm sharing this because I need to vent and I also want to make you folks aware of it in case you have family members who got force-upgraded to Windows 10 and now have performance issues. Tell me if I'm crazy