Constant disk access and slow transfer rate...help!

[White Widow]

Sometime in the past week I became aware of a problem with my Compaq Presario X1000 notebook. Whenever I close an application, the HD will read/write for a long time (often several minutes) during which time I cannot switch applications or do anything else. I can move the mouse freely, but trying to select an open application prompts Windows to respond with an "Application Not Resonding" tag for that app. According to Windows Task Manager, the CPU is almost idle during this time, and I have hundreds of MB of free physical memory. This freezing effect dows not happen when I open applications.

Opening files/applications has also become generally slower and according to SiSoft Sandra my HD transfer rate has dropped from roughly 25MB/sec to 14MB/sec (I have a Hitachi 7K60 60GB 7200RPM). I have run the latest AdAware and found no spyware/adware, and did a complete system scan with KAV and found no viruses. The system runs fine otherwise. I have no idea about what might be causing this or even where to look next. I would strongly prefer NOT to have to reinstall XP. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[LTC8K6]

Hard drive in PIO mode?

 

[johnjkr1]

it could be a bad hard drive? you could run the diagnostic on it to check it out.

 

[White Widow]

Well, I sort of have a solution - kind of. I was running System Mechanic to clean up my registry, and saw this little check box: "minimize WindowsXP Pagefile usage" - so I checked it and now things are much smoother. Does anyone know what this setting corresponds to in WinXP?

The drive throughput is still lower, but the system runs great, so no real problems. SMART is reporting the drive as OK, so I'm inclined to think it's something else...

 

[L1FE]

I'd have to agree that it's something else also. I have a Dell 2650 and it used to be able to play videos etc without any problem. Suddenly things started getting really slow so I decided to just reformat the sucker and do a fresh install of winxp. While things sped up in general, video playback was still unacceptable unless I allowed mpc to use 100% cpu. It seems like laptop harddisks just aren't as versatile as we'd like them to be.

 

[White Widow]

I really don't think it's the hard drive - I've had this drive for almost 6 months and until a few weeks ago it performed like a champ. Again, this is no ordinary notebook hard drive. This is a 7200RPM 8MB Hitachi 7K60, and this one (used to) fly through benchmarks. Also, LOADING files and applications is just as speedy as ever, it's onyl when CLOSING applications that the disk would read/write for a long time. Finally, I found thi setting in System Mechanic to reduce Windows Pagefile usage, and my problems have gone away. The throughput is still lower than it was when I benchmarked the drive 2 months ago, but the system runs fine now.