pro tip. buy 16gb corsair veganance while its still super cheap. only idiot runs a 4gb ram laptop and the 99% disk means your hard drive is busted. buy an ssd
OP - You only have 4GB RAM, my machine uses about 2GB with Windows 10, and slightly more with 8.1 - and that's with 12GB RAM No memory leak there And the 99% HDD usage does not mean your drive is dying... wtf
I only see the 99~100% HDD access when a computer has low amounts of ram, and the HDD is thrashing between the pagefile and doing other things, or on older models of harddrives like the 160GB ones. HDD activity will eventually die down when windows is finished doing whatever it set out to do. Putting the pagefile on a seperate drive when available and keeping the drive well defragmented helps alleviate the problems somewhat. Or just get a SSD. As for ram usage, lol, I idle at 6.8/31.9GB on a good day and regularly go over 8gb. I just have too many things running in the background and ram leaky tabs with flash things running. CPU is happily speedstepped down to sub 1.5ghz with 5~6% utilization when idle though.
So many people suggest what every fanboy would suggest, buy MORE HARDWARE to compensate a SOFTWARE PROBLEM. If you ask me, drop 10, go back to 8 or better to 7. Doesnt worth. There is no a real reason to move to 10, more cause its pointed to their "market" and its framework the only things that is good, its just for that, eat resources. Of course if you buy a SSD would boot faster, of course, but that wont solve the problem, they are assuming the people are moving to their "new" OS with new hardware, cause m$ doesnt sell software, always had been the hardware.
99% disk drive usage CAN be an indicator that your HDD is dying - but in such a case it's not the only one. For example, it would be at 99% almost all of the time with a throughput as small as 0.1 MB/sec even when the system seems to be idle, the system would also be really slow all of a sudden, and the HDD itself would also make strange clicking sounds or something like that. And, yes, I also like the suggestion to install 16 GB of RAM to people who probably use less than 4 GB 99,9% of the time. 4 GB is still fine, except you do a lot of media editing or gaming, or run VMs. EDIT: The 99% happened to me too - it was during the latest cumulative update install. It seems that the Windows Modules installer uses large amounts of RAM and heavy disk access. Seems the indicator is kind of broken because it always is close or around 99%, but throughput varies from a few to a lot of MB/sec.
So, if he had 2GBs of ram, what would be your suggestion then? Hardware has never been cheaper than it is today...I remember when ram cost as much as $100 per MEGabyte. It's dirt cheap, today. 1000x that much ram, at least 300x faster, costs ~10x less today. And why shouldn't he use Win10 if he wants? If he owns Win7 or 8 it's free, and 100% of the R&D at Microsoft will be going into to 10 from now on. Win7/8 will be getting security patches and little else for the remainder of their lifespans. They are already "old hat"--I mean, XP still "works" but wtf wants XP?... Windows is going to grab a hunk of ram to use as a cache and the two things to remember about that are: 1) It builds its cache depending on how much physical memory is installed, and what programs are being run 2) OS cache is elastic and dynamic, and if a program needs the ram it's using it will contract and release what's needed to the application So, just because the readout says "2 GBs available" doesn't mean it might not be closer to 3GBs if needed. I'd say it's time to add ram when the applications you're running start telling you that you need more in order to run them. Regardless of OS, pretty much, going from 2gb to 4gb physical ram will net the user a large performance increase in most cases. Going from 4GB to 8GB (64-bit OS of course) the performance gain drops off sharply, but ironically compatibility goes up, as today even some *games* require 6-8GBs of ram, minimum. Going from 8GBs to 16GBs+ will net no perceivable performance gain--but is nice in a multitasking environment as many more programs can reside in ram simultaneously without disk paging. In that case, there'd be a pretty hefty performance gain... Just my two cents...