So every once in a while I'll be playing Guild Wars 2 and I'll notice that the gameplay suddenly gets a little choppy, or I'll be browsing the web and I'll hear my hard drive start to make more noise than normal. I open up the task manager and, lo and behold, there's a system process with 100% disk usage. Opening its properties shows that it's ntoskrnl.exe. The 100% disk usage can go on for a long time - up to about half an hour - after which it drops down to 0% and everything is normal again. My question is, what could ntoskrnl possibly be doing that it feels is important enough to run right this instant and interrupt my precious gaming time instead of waiting for the system to be idle? Is there anything I can do about it?
Specs:
OS: Windows 8 Pro x64
CPU: Q6600 @ 3.3 GHz
MB: Asus Maximus Formula
RAM: 4 GB DDR2-1100
HDD: WD6400AAKS
GPU: GTX 660Ti