A technician is investigating why a Windows 10 workstation feels sluggish even though CPU usage stays below 20% and RAM usage stays under 50%. Opening Task Manager's Performance tab, the technician notices the disk usage graph is pegged near 100% almost constantly. Which conclusion is BEST supported by this observation?
- A. The processor is overheating and throttling performance
- B. The storage drive is the current performance bottleneck Correct
- C. The system lacks sufficient installed RAM
- D. A GPU driver conflict is causing the slowdown
Why B is correct
When CPU and RAM both show plenty of headroom but the disk graph stays pinned near 100%, the storage device — often an aging HDD, a nearly-full SSD, or one running background scans — is the limiting factor for overall responsiveness. Read the graphs, follow the evidence.
Why the others are incorrect
CPU throttling from overheating would show elevated CPU activity or thermal-related process behavior, not 20% usage. Insufficient RAM would show high memory utilization or heavy paging — memory is under 50% here. And GPU issues aren't reflected on the Performance tab's CPU/memory/disk/network graphs at all.