Ever since around April or May, I've had the recurring issue in which my disk usage would shoot up to 99% or 100% without anything occurring to really cause it to do so. I tried many of the solutions in order to fix this, and it seemed that Firefox was related to the problem. Whenever I would open it, it would go up, and when I would close it, it would go down. At that point, I was never able to pin down the root cause exactly, but not opening FF would prevent the problem, so I just never did.
A few weeks ago, the problem began to reappear, this time without Firefox causing the problem. It varies in severity, sometimes it will only hang for a minute, sometimes for extended periods of time, up to where my computer will be completely immobilized.
I've tried a variety of solutions to fix this, such as:
- Increasing virtual memory
- Disabling Superfetch, Windows Update, and Windows Search
- Using CCleaner to clean the registry
- Refreshing the PC
- Manually updating Windows (which I just did recently, over 1GB updates missed)
While it seems that updating Windows improved performance, the problem still occurs. In general, it seems the problem doesn't happen now unless I open Windows Media Player. Earlier, the problem would definitely happen when I opened WMP, but it could also just randomly happen. The computer will run just fine, but when I open WMP, the Disk Usage will go straight up to 100%, sometimes staying there until I close it, or sometimes will go down on it's own. It's completely random. When I look in Resource Monitor, nothing special seems to appear while this happens. Occasionally a file related to WMP will appear, and also the Page File, but a majority of the time it is still just files that appear prior to the huge spike. I have already un and reinstalled WMP, but that did not seem to help.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what to do to fix this. It's incredibly annoying, and occasionally making my computer unusable is a huge obstacle. I would also really like to use WMP again, as I have yet to discover another media player that I like
as much. Plus, if the problem is not fixed, I know within a few months it will just be some other program that will cause this problem.
