My Windows 8.1 laptop has long since started to bog down. I tried all sorts of things - shutting down the Windows indexing service, killing the Superfetch process, increasing the size of the pagefile and a variety of other solutions mentioned online.
But I noticed that it was always a problem when Chrome was running, rarely a problem when it wasn't. In fact, as soon as I start up Chrome, disk usage pegs at 100% and everything starts to bog down.
So finally, I did this:
- Go to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local
- Right click on the Google folder and open Properties
- Click on Advanced
- Deselect "Allow files in this folder to have contents indexed in addition to properties" (in addition, in my case, all the other checkboxes were already deselected).
- Click okay and check our resources again
I did this and as I sit here, with several apps open, including Chrome which I am using to write this, the disk usage monitor is moving between 0% and 4% and mostly sittling at 1%
I haven't seen it at 1% with Chrome open in years.
According to the
Tom's Guide page that tipped me off to this [tomsguide.com] you can also go into the Security tab and set Full control to Deny for SYSTEM. So far that is not necessary for me and I'm not sure what the effects of that might be.
This has been driving me crazy for a few months at least and it's probably been getting worse for a long time, but just didn't hit the threshhold that made it bog my machine down so I didn't notice.
For better or worse, before I figured that out, I purchased new RAM to double the memory on the system. But now the old laptop will have 16GB, which doesn't seem like a bad thing, though perhaps a waste of money (I did that because I was thinking that it was paging a lot of stuff in and out of virtual memory and that was the issue).
