You can probably track that with wireshark. I'd bet money, especially if it is a win10 machine. That connection to the freaking mothership is all important, you know.
Yeah, it's Win 10. That's what I'm assuming the issue is too.
Like, last week I discovered something in Win 7 that made my fucking blood boil.
So I was downloading a steam game, which usually hits my standard hard drive reasonably hard. I can see the impact pretty readily. Yet during this download, things. Were. Terrible. Several minutes for my browser to open, all my applications lagging to hell. It was the worst I'd seen.
So I pop open Resource Monitor and check what's hitting my disk. And the top entries are......two weird processes I've never heard before....looking at .exes for Steam games, some that I've played within the last week, some I've played in the last month. As soon as those windows processes go away, everything returns to normal ish.
I pop open Google to check the process....and lo. What do I find? If you've flagged your system to be part of the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program, Windows has processes that check EVERY GODDAMN FILE ON YOUR SYSTEM for windows 10 compatibility on a regular basis. They're run via scheduled tasks that the WCEIP enables and manages.
WTF Microsoft! Windows 10 is out in the wild and the free upgrade is gone, why is this fucking shit destroying my hard drive and repeatedly checking several gig files when I'm already hitting my system resources hard doing tons of other things?