W10 2004/20H2 on 5400rpm drives - always awful?

L1011

I've started to notice that relatively solid, few year old laptops - Core i3 5th and 6th gen, reputable manufacturers, 8GB RAM etc - are absolutely unusable on 2004 or 20H2.

Something system-wise will peg it to 100% disk usage basically all the time, the filtering engine, various services and so on. Patch Tuesday results in four or five days of unusable speeds.

I'm just throwing SSDs in as most of those machines would probably do from an OS wipe anyway and decent/fast 2.5" SSDs are dirt cheap now - but is there anything at all that can be done to make them more usable without doing that?

Some of the ridiculous demand levels for new laptops may be down to people replacing a machine that was actually fine til a while ago; if it isn't just something that seems to happen to stuff I need to look after!

smuggler.ie

Just thinking - in instance of ver. upgrade, does Win10 need to rebuild index and this is causing high disk activity? Have to remember to monitor this next time i come across upgrade.
As for updates - you can pause them for 4x7days, at least it is on v1909

L1011

These would generally be some time out from the version upgrade.

These machines would have 450-550 quid when new and an equivalent spec, but with SSD, machine now might be 750 due to the demand spike; just to reclaim normal operational performance from a few years ago. Some of them are an absolute bollox to open to swap the disk also.

At least the media creation tool and on-BIOS serial make it a much easier job than finding the right OEM disk, hoping the serial hasn't rubbed off, running eight years of updates, etc like in ye-olde days

L1011

Had an odd one this week, machine that had updated to 20H2 and been running like a dog and it seems the added load actually killed the disk. SSD and more RAM and it's flying. Fourth gen i3 so nothing vaguely fancy.

advertsfox

Temporarily disable Search Indexing and see if it improves. I wouldn't go near a 5400rpm drive for storage, let alone running an OS so the SSD would be the recommendation.

L1011

If I had a time machine to back and make my predecessors pay a bit more for 7200rpm or, more realistically, SSD machines (at a significant price premium as they were) - I think I'd use it for more pressing issues!

Problem is there are huge numbers of 5400 rpm spinning rust machines out there, possibly being made prematurely obsolete by how fat Win10 has got. Normal end user won't know how to neuter certain services and may need the search indexer anyway.