uTorrent - slowing down, hammering hard drive

[alansausse]

Windows 8 laptop PC, 500GB hard drive, 8GB RAM, dual core Intel processor.

 

Have used uTorrent for several years.  Recent problem with it - if downloading more than a couple of torrents at a time (needn't be big files either), the hard disk activity shoots up, uTorrent becomes unresponsive (although the downloads still progress) and the whole PC often grinds to a halt.

 

From checking the Task Manager, what's killing the PC is massive hard drive activity.  However, until recently, this wasn't the case.

 

Running latest version of uTorrent (3.4.2 build 32080).

 

uTorrent speed graph looks very odd when this is happening - sawtooth type pattern and some odd speeds - up to about 25MB/s download speed in little spikes, which can't be right (max download speed from my internet connection is about 125Mbit/s).

 

Occasional warning messages in the uTorrent status bar at the bottom about disk overload.

 

Anyone know what might be causing this problem & how I might be able to fix it?

 

Thanks!
Alan.

[alansausse]

Oooh, my mistake.  It's not hard disk activity, it's CPU activity.

 

Started uTorrent up, started a number of torrents running.  All was well.  Minimised window and left it alone.

 

Went back a few mins later, all was well, opened the uTorrent window again and clicked on it, suddenly the whole thing ground to a halt.

 

Task manager showing about 70% CPU usage after that (was more like 5% before).