Hard Drive Running - Locks Up Any Other Use - What Is Going On?

[Win10-frustration!]

How can I determine what is causing my computer to be non-responsive? The hard drive is grinding away and nothing I click on works. It seems as if what should be 'background' processes take over and it won't do anything else ... and this goes on for hours, not just for a minute or two ...

 

[Ian]

Are you able to do anything at all when your hard drive is clicking away? (i.e. does the mouse move, can you interact with windows, etc...)?

If you have some control, you could try loading Task Manager (right click the taskbar, click Task Manager) and see which processes are consuming large amounts of disk/memory/cpu time.

If your HDD is making a lot of noise and your PC is entirely non-responsive, I'd check the error logs (search for "event viewer") and see if any warnings/errors occur around the time that you noticed problems. That may help us to begin troubleshooting things.

 

[Win10-frustration!]

The mouse moves but there is no response to clicking on any link ... I have to turn it off or restart it to get anything. And, usually, when it restarts it is in the same 'non-responsive' state. Thanks for your suggestions ... I will use them and see what happens!

 

[Win10-frustration!]

Actually - using your event viewer suggestion, I saw lots of "DistributedCOM" errors - and on the right side under "latest articles" was this "Event ID 10016 - DistributedCOM Regedit32 posted Sep 6, 2016" I have followed that process ... hope it is the answer! It went fine and - even though the article is long with lots of steps - it is very clear and easy to follow ... great instructions!