As millions of Windows 10 users, I am experiencing the 100% disk usage every day dozens of times a day. As far as I can make it, this is caused by how Windows handles disk access operations as a process with such high priority that it does not leave any
room for any other process, and as such, the whole system is almost unresponsive, to the point that you can't even play music, let alone videos, as the playing is frequently interrupted because the media player is not allowed to read from the disk before the
end of the media buffer is reached.
The slow down of the disk can be repro'd consistently when you copy or worse, move files. Copying them between partitions of the same internal hard drive is much worse than copying them to an external drive. Having only dozens of gigabytes free on the system
or data partition also seems to slow down the computer's disk operations. Windows does not seem to keep up with automatic partitioning either, especially if you download files directly from file servers or by fragments from torrents, and these downloads by
themselves also can bring down the computer on its knees if it had any.
It's great that Windows uses the disk or the network bandwidth to its full capacity, but it seems to do a poor job at balancing the priorities between application, at least a much worse job than when I had Windows 7 on the same machine with the same type
of usage. I bought a Windows 10 license and installed it from scratch, I didn't upgrade from my Windows 7 installation, but it feels so much like a regression from the user's perspective. File Explorer is plainly unusable, between the incredibly slow file
copy operations, the constant refresh of the folder view, the folder view never memorizing the last view used, like Detailed view, but doing whatever it thinks is good for me, having to switch the toolbar constantly between Computer and View because the most
used tool icons are on 2 different toolbars because File Explorer now has huge tool icons that won't fit on a single line and a single toolbar, file copy operations that stay stuck at 99% and never complete, etc. This is just madness.
I don't mind the "modern" user interface even though I never ever use it, but this is no reason to penalize users with features as basic as disk access operations that don't work. I also wonder what computers do the Microsoft employees and managers use,
that they don't experience or react to these constant bugs...