Windows 11 Laptop using HDD and SDD to run laptop (Very slow)

[Gunnj88]

I usually use my laptop for work/study. However, recently, I noticed when I had a lot of tabs open, my laptop was lagging and becoming very slow. I was quite shocked because this had not happened before and my laptop always used to run smoothly (unless there was a majorly demanding software I was running). So I checked the Task Manager and realized that my HDD was spiking to 100% which was not normal as I have my SSD as my main tool to load up things. (Image Below). This was quite weird because before the HDD wasn't being used (0%) while the SSD was about 0 - 10%


It's quite annoying my laptop is getting slow, how can I solve this issue?


(Laptop: Dell Inspiron 15 3501)
Device name: Laptop
Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz 2.80 GHz
Installed RAM: 8.00 GB (7.73 GB usable)
System type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Thanks,
Gunn

SSD and HDD running simultaneously

 

[Neemobeer]

Well your HDD is probably spiking due to your RAM hitting 80+% usage. When that happens the system needs to context switch a lot more which means data is being swapped in and out of memory since there isn't much left for loading additional content. If you can, upgrade the system to 16GB and the issue so go away.

 

[Gunnj88]

Here is my ram usage right now:

Is this a bit strange that the ram usage is 7.7gb when i only opened 3 tabs of chrome, whatsapp and task manager?

Also, is it the lack of ram that my laptop uses both HDD and SSD?

 

[Neemobeer]

If you have programs that run from both drives then yes they could both have high IO. Everything on the system uses memory including anything running in the background you can not see. You probably want to grab a copy of 'procexp' and sort by 'Working Set' to see what is using memory. In procexp you will also want to make sure to run as admin. In the program click File > 'Run as Administrator' to get a full picture