Windows 8 keeps slows down to 100% disk usage and hangs.

I seem to have resolved this issue for myself and wish to share it with you all. I see a lot of myth and misunderstanding in you guys' perspectives, so I intend to clarify a few things for you. I'm a computer technician with good technical knowledge. I too have had the misfortune of buying a Windows 8 system to my complete dissatisfaction. Its a broken product. If possible for you my best recommendation is to revert to Win 7. If not an option or choice for you then keep reading.

There is 2 issues that I noticed with my system that were really problematic. One is the HDD usage and the other RAM Usage. Mind you I have a Core i3 3110 at 2.4Ghz with 4GB Ram and Mechanical HDD. It's a pretty good system very capable of running everything and shouldn't have any trouble.

I noticed that my hard drive would randomly go off like crazy and completely prevent any usability for unreasonably log periods of time. I also noticed that at random times there would be almost 1.5 gigs of extra ram being used without any clear source shown in Task Manager.

The way I resolved this was by paying very close attention to Task Manager and Resource Monitor apps. I would leave them both open either minimized or just in the background, and as soon as I noticed a slowdown without my input I would immediately rush to Task Manager to determine if it was CPU based or HDD based. It turns out its usually the HDD. What you need to do here is to catch the process that is causing this in the act and before it stops its action. So you need to be quick about it. So:

1. Quickly jump to task manager (Make sure that Task Manager is in advanced mode so you see the details).
2. Look to see if its the HDD or the CPU that is in high usage
3. Click on the CPU or HDD usage "Sorting" button (depending on which one is the one being hogged) and sort the processes according to that column.
4. Now OBSERVE!!.... Pay close attention to the names that come up and findout which processes are the culprit.
5. Also pay attention if the total usage of the CPU/HDD matches the numbers reported by the processes. This is important because you may notice that while your HDD usage maybe at 100%, your processes may be at much lower numbers such that their total % put together will not add up to your total usage. This will show that the actual process that is hogging the CPU/HDD is not actually listed in your Task Manager process list. ( this is actually usually the case and the key to finding the culprit).
6. The next step is to look in Resource monitor. (Resource Monitor is located at the bottom of the Performance tab in Task Manager). Quickly switch to Resource monitor and jump to the appropriate tab to monitor either the CPU or HDD activity.
7. Play around with the sorting options quickly to find out the most active processes. In the case of CPU activity it should be easy as there is only one variable to observe. In the case of HDD there is a few more variables (read/write), all of which you should be looking at to discover which process is the main culprit. Make sure all the different columns are enabled on each of the tabs so you can see all the different variables. (Add columns by right clicking on the column title bar and clicking on "selected Columns...").

What I noticed at this point was that there was an app called LiveComm.exe which was causing the entire problem. To understand what this process is you can search for it in google, but to give a brief description its the main communication app between your Win8 and Microsoft and it is packaged as part of the Windows Live apps which are bundled in to your Win8 as part of the product. This package includes the "Messaging" app, the "Mail" app, and the "Calender" app which ship with Windows 8. To remove LiveComm.exe Completely from your system you have uninstall the "Messaging" app which also requires you to uninstall the Calender and Mail app.

Alternatively you can simply detect this process every time it comes up and simply terminating it in Resource Monitor. This will not stop the program permanently. As a matter of fact you may notice that this process reruns itself again in the background but its execution is requested by other Win8 apps and is does not always come back immediately and sometimes doesn't come back for hours. When it does come back it does not cause the problems that it may have been doing prior. So, this little app doesn't always cause problems, but sometimes completely hogs your HDD and sometimes your CPU, and sometimes you RAM. In that on case that I mentioned I simply noticed about 1.5 GB of my ram utilized without any apparent processes shown in Task Manager. Upon closer inspection it turned out to be LiveComm at it again. Now I have turned off my Virtual memory on my system to increase general performance, and, windows using 1.2 GB of ram by default, and this exe using 1.5, GB, I only had I only had about 1 GB of usable RAM left and was getting Low memory warnings with just opening firefox!

Noteworthy here is, you should also monitor the amount of Ram usage in your system. After a week of doing this you will learn if there are any processes that overuse your ram and you can eliminate them from starting.

Now if LiveComm doesn't seem to be the culprit for you, using the method explained above will still help you find the problematic process.

At this point I should also clarify some misunderstandings and myths and state some facts:

1. More virtual memory does not increase your PC performance, it decreases it. The reason for having VM is stability, not performance, as well as the fact that low RAM can sometimes necessitate Usage of VM. For those of you with 6 GB of ram or more, I recommend turning off VM completely or leaving it on 256MB min and a 1024MB Max. I have 4GB Ram and my VM is off. I do ron into problems though when I have 50 to 70 webpages open at the same time. If that's what you wanna do, then leave some VM. Avoid high VM. If you have 4GB of Ram and 1GB of VM and you are still running out of memory , then you don't know how to use a PC or there is something wrong with your system.
2. Network cards do not cause HDD activity. That's just crazy. Whoever said that. No matter how bad your network Driver is. Same goes for Optical Drives. The light might be on due to bad driver control, but that does not cause HDD utilization. Highly unlikely, and kind of bizarre.
3. Disabling search Indexing definitely reduces HDD Activity. Know that the Indexing service only does its hard crunching once, so it shouldn't be a big issue. Although I don't doubt that the Win8 version might be utterly intrusive and terrible. So disabling will certainly improve performance, however it is highly unlikely that it's the culprit for your consistent HDD slowdown issues.
4. Using an SSD will radically improve your HDD speed and freeze issues, however, it doesn't solve the problem at its source. Instead all that abuse will now be directed to your SSD and will ruin your SSD over time. so you must find and resolve the source of the HDD utilization problem.
5. Consider setting Windows Update to either "Notify without downloading" or disabling it completely until you are ready to update. I prefer to cut off as much communication between my computer and Microsoft or Apple to prevent any unnecessary usage of my device without my permission. Your choice.
6. Regarding Anti Virus programs, I can tell you that Norton is one of the worst AVs you can install on your system. I strongly advice against it. MSE should be a reliable one but I can not comment on its performance. I am not a fanboy and only say this for your own good. I have had to install and deal with many Anti Virus programs on client computers and by far Avast has been the best in all sense. Norton the worst, and McAfee bad, and AVG simply very poor. Overall I recommend Avast, MSE, and Avira to my clients.

Best of Luck.

My system has massively improved since I have taken a above mentioned actions. I even bought an SSD to resolve the sluggishness of Win8. But now I'm not gonna bother putting it under the hood of win 8 to be misused. I'm just gonna start new with Win7 on an SSD and experience real contentment without head aches and a proper start menu :).