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Vista and Constant Hard Drive Activity

M

marks70

Senior member
I just purchased a laptop with Vista Premium on it and 2 gigs of RAM, and I've been using it for close to 4 days . For about 10 minutes after the laptop has finished booting up, my hard drive is thrashing away. I've had two other computers briefly with Vista on them, and they exhibited the exact same problem. I tried disabling Indexing as I read that this might be the problem, but it still thrashes away.

If its not the Indexing service, what else could it be? Its driving me nuts not being able to figure out what is causing it.
 
Originally posted by: marks70
Originally posted by: AmberClad
Superfetch?
Click to expand...
Nope, that's not it either. Disabled Superfetch and it still has constant activity for the first 10 minutes or so.
Click to expand...

too much junk preinstalled?

also to disable superfetch you often have to reboot.
 
The update agent is known to thrash the disk on its own.
When this is happening, what task does your Task Manager show with high CPU usage?

And this is dupe
 
My guess is that it is defragging your hard drive. In vista you dont have to defrag because it does it by itsself when idle. In my experience it does it whenever it feels like it. Ive disabled the indexing thing because its bullcrap and dosent work on my USB hard drive which sucks as it makes what would be one hell of a useful feature totally useless to me.
 
Originally posted by: Soviet
My guess is that it is defragging your hard drive. In vista you dont have to defrag because it does it by itsself when idle. In my experience it does it whenever it feels like it. Ive disabled the indexing thing because its bullcrap and dosent work on my USB hard drive which sucks as it makes what would be one hell of a useful feature totally useless to me.
Click to expand...

Have you tried manually adding your USB drive to the indexing service? Per the help and support center:

Click to open Indexing Options.

Click Modify.

To add a location, select its check box in the Change selected locations list, and then click OK.

If you don't see all of the locations on your computer in the Change selected locations list, click Show all locations. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

If you want to include a folder but not all of its subfolders, expand the folder, and then clear the check box next to any folder you don't want to index. These folders will appear in the Exclude column of the Summary of selected locations list.

 
My roomates comptuer does the same thing as well. Using the Nvidia 650 SLI chipset. I switched back to XP for now, but when I was running Vista, I never experienced that issue, I'm using an Intel 975X chipset.
 
Originally posted by: blackangst1
Originally posted by: Soviet
My guess is that it is defragging your hard drive. In vista you dont have to defrag because it does it by itsself when idle. In my experience it does it whenever it feels like it. Ive disabled the indexing thing because its bullcrap and dosent work on my USB hard drive which sucks as it makes what would be one hell of a useful feature totally useless to me.
Click to expand...

Have you tried manually adding your USB drive to the indexing service? Per the help and support center:

Click to open Indexing Options.

Click Modify.

To add a location, select its check box in the Change selected locations list, and then click OK.

If you don't see all of the locations on your computer in the Change selected locations list, click Show all locations. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

If you want to include a folder but not all of its subfolders, expand the folder, and then clear the check box next to any folder you don't want to index. These folders will appear in the Exclude column of the Summary of selected locations list.
Click to expand...

I think i tried that yeah, i remember the tickbox and my USB drive was selected, all folders and files were selected too. Ill give it another bash as i got it partially working, it would find alien 1 and alien 4 but not alien 2 and 3, as far as i know they were all the same file type, i dunno ill look into it more.

Originally posted by: stash
In my experience it does it whenever it feels like it.
Click to expand...
Have you actually verified that, or are you just guessing?
Click to expand...

Guessing. It dosent always wait until im idle, although it may not be the defragger thats making the hdd go, could be something else, i have no way of telling whats accessing the hdd at any given moment.
 
Any other suggestions? The frustrating part about this post is that I've read a number of other people asking the same question, but they never find a solution.
 
Originally posted by: marks70
Originally posted by: AmberClad
Superfetch?
Click to expand...
Nope, that's not it either. Disabled Superfetch and it still has constant activity for the first 10 minutes or so.
Click to expand...

Superfetch does most of it's work in the first five minutes you boot the PC. Any changes the service needs to do later will only take a few minutes at most, so that is not the source of your thrashing problem. Superfetch is one service you do not want to disable simply because your PC will be less responsive without it.

What programs do you have running in the background during startup? Go to the search pane in the menu and type "msconfig". Uncheck everything but your firewall, video card, antivirus and Creative drivers if you have a Creative card. All the other programs running like, Realplayer, Quicktime, Java etc, etc, do not need to be running all the time to work properly. These may be the source of all the hard drive thrashing.

Nero is also a big contributor to this problem with their integrated search and their own indexing service. Either use Nero Lite or switch to another program that does not force all of this useless crap you do not want down your throat with no real way to disable it.

 
After restart hibernate builds a very large file on your hard drive.
Indexing service will also thrash your hard drive to death.
You need to kill them both.
These two items were some of the most complained about during the beta, but MS never bothered to address them.

Bozo 😀
 
Thanks for some of the suggestions. I'm pretty sure its a combination of things, with the biggest culprits being Superfetch and System Restore. I tried disabling ALL items in my Startup group in Msconfig, and that didn't do squat. If I disable both Superfetch and System Restore, most of the thrashing goes away after boot. However, I'd ideally like to leave System Restore running. Any idea if its possible to customize System Restore, such as only doing restore points when I want it to?
 
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