My Asus TUF Gaming laptop is about six years old and started having severe slowdowns two days ago. A Steam game froze while launching, and Task Manager showed the disk at 100% usage even though very little was running. Since then, Firefox, Discord, Steam, and other programs take a long time to open and may freeze or crash during startup. If an application does manage to launch, it generally performs normally afterward, including games such as Fortnite and Deadlock. I have already disabled startup programs, run chkdsk, updated drivers, removed Armoury Crate, and completed a full Windows Defender scan, but disk usage remains near 100%. What should I check next to identify the cause?
1 Answer
Some disk activity is normal because Windows may be indexing files, installing updates, scanning for malware, or handling background maintenance. Leave the laptop idle for a while and watch the drive-activity indicator and Task Manager. If the usage stays high for long periods or programs consistently hang while loading, the storage drive itself may be aging or failing, so back up important files and check its health before troubleshooting further.

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