A marketing user reports that her Windows 10 desktop has become sluggish over the past week. Simple tasks such as launching File Explorer now take 30-60 seconds. Task Manager shows disk utilization pegged at 100 % even when CPU usage is below 10 %. Further investigation shows the System process performing frequent read/write operations on drive C:, a 5400-RPM magnetic HDD. Which of the following is the MOST likely first remediation step to improve performance?
Schedule a full chkdsk /r scan to repair the hard drive
Temporarily disable the Windows Search service to stop disk indexing
Upgrade the system to faster DDR5 memory modules
Roll back the most recent Windows 10 quality update
Constant 100 % disk usage on a mechanical hard drive often results from Windows Search continually indexing files. Disabling the Windows Search (WSearch) service immediately stops the heavy background I/O and allows the technician to confirm that indexing is the bottleneck. RAM upgrades address memory pressure, not disk saturation; chkdsk repairs file-system errors but rarely fixes continuous indexing activity; rolling back updates does not target the disk-intensive search indexer.
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