Fixing 100% disk usage in Windows 10 with Chrome and Skype running

Anonymous
2015-08-16T12:25:27+00:00

How to fix 100% disk usage in Windows 10

This is caused by a common combination of Skype as well Google Chrome. Similar issue with other programs could also cause 100% disk usage. To fix this do the following:

Google Chrome:

In Google Chrome, go to Settings > Show Advanced Settings ... > Privacy > Prefetch resources to load pages more quickly

and untick it. See Figure-1 below:

Figure-1

Skype:

Make sure you have exited Skype and it is not running in the taskbar (if it is running in the taskbar then quit it).

Open Windows Explorer and open the following folder:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone"

Now right click "Skype.exe" file and then click "Properties" and open the "Security" tab.

Click the "Edit" button and then highlight "ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES" and place a tick in the "Write" box.

Click "Apply" and then "OK" and then "OK" again. See Figures-2 to Figure-6 below:

This is it, now run Skype and check the Disk Usage in Task Manager and it will no longer show you 100% disk usage anymore:-

I hope this helps people. I spent a long time in finding a solution to this problem.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Devices and drivers

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-05-17T05:11:06+00:00

    My Hero lol. Such an easy fix for such a debilitating problem. Thank you so much!

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-05-18T10:11:05+00:00

    Thank you so much for the precise answer! It has instantly solved the issue on my machine! Brilliant stuff! 

    Regards,

    Astha

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-05-18T16:09:50+00:00

    Hello Anastasios,

    I had a look at your solution.  I was surprised to see that my computer was already set to one processor, while the available memory was already set to 0.  I have an i7, quad 4 processor with 8GB memory, and I'm wondering if this is the cause of my slowdown problem. 

    I also have one other smaller issue that I've noticed.  My computer uses the page file too much, even though there is plenty of memory available.  I always thought that the page file was only needed when not enough memory was available.

    What do you think?  Should I change the available processors from 1 to 4??  And what should my memory setting be?

    By the way, since I uninstalled Java, the system has been running well, except that the fan is on more than I would expect.  But maybe that's an entirely different issue.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-05-19T10:21:22+00:00

    Hello friend.

    First i'd like to make it clear that i'm not an expert. I wouldn't had found the solution myself, kudos to the Microsoft support person who immediately identified the problem (sadly i don't recall his/her name).

    From the experimentations that i've performed in the last few days the "solution" works best when you set the processor count to 1. However it is a pity to have such a powerful PC as yours and only utilize one cpu core. So if i were you i'd leave the number of processors checkbox unchecked (if i'm not mistaken that corresponds to setting it to the maximum).

    For the maximum memory checkbox i'd set it to 8 * 1024  (because 1 GB is 1024 MB and we want to enter MB) = 8192

    Everyone should make sure that their hdd partition where the OS resides has at least the specified amount empty space.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-05-19T13:38:47+00:00

    Thank you friend. 

    Right now, both check boxes, for CPU and memory, are unchecked.  I guess this is the default setting.  I also assume that this means the values indicated below them (1 for CPU and 0 for memory) are not relevant.  I'm further assuming that since these values are not relevant, that the computer is then using all processors available and all memory available.

    Maybe you or someone else with more experience can comment on this??

    Too confusing for words isn't it!

    Thanks

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