Windows 8.1 100% Disk Usage by Ntoskrnl.exe

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 with 4 GB RAM, Intel Celeron 1007U 1.50 GHz Dual-Core, running windows 8.1 (x64).

Recently, I've been having a problem with high disk usage. I can't say for sure when or why it started, but one day I noticed my computer running horrendously slow. I checked Task Manager and noticed my disk was at 100% and a System process was using 50 MB/s (every other process was at 0 or 0.1 MB/s). I looked at the process and saw that it was ntoskrnl.exe. I can't kill the process as it's crucial for the system, but it's making my computer almost unusable.

I've looked all over the net for fixes (it seems many people have a problem like this) and none have worked. One suggested changing power settings from Balanced to High Performance. Another suggested increasing virtual memory. I did both of those things to no avail (VM is now set at 4096 MB min, 8192 max).

So then I looked at Resource Monitor, just to see what exactly the process was doing. Ntoskrnl.exe is reading around 10,000-30,000 B/sec (sometimes it drops down to 0 or just above) and writing around 50,000,000 B/sec. What could be causing this? I can understand the process having to read/write stuff sometimes, but why would it be writing so much all the time?

I then checked Event Viewer to see if there were any errors. I didn't find any of importance but I did notice a recurring log by Kernel-General. It seems a log is being made about 3 times a minute. All of them are Information logs with the event ID 16 and they all say the same thing:

The access history in hive \??\C:\Windows\SysWOW64\CONFIG\SYSTEM was cleared updating 0 keys and creating 0 modified pages.

This leads me to conclude that something is up with the SYSTEM file. Something is causing the kernel to constantly check on it, make logs, or something. I'm not exactly sure.

That's why I come to SuperUser for help. (Microsoft TechSupport is total garbage IMO) If someone could help me resolve this issue I would greatly appreciate it.