Vista and Disk Usage

RadiclDreamer

Diamond Member
Aug 8, 2004
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Is it just me or does anyone elses vista install seem to have tons of hdd activity even when the machine is idle? Im running business upgraded from XP on a dual core opteron with 2 GB ram and it is very snappy, but annoying with the hdd moving all the time.
 

postmortemIA

Diamond Member
Jul 11, 2006
7,721
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disk defragmenting... have you turned that off too? by default it does defragmentation at each boot.
 

RadiclDreamer

Diamond Member
Aug 8, 2004
8,622
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Well, I've checked the defrag and the process is not running and it is only scheduled in the early AM. I also disabled windows defender so we will see how that goes
 

BehindEnemyLines

Senior member
Jul 24, 2000
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You can view which proccesses are utilizing read/write to hard drive by opening up Task Manager. Look for something similar to Resource Monitor (something like that). It has complete details of almost everything including which programs or processes are using the hard drive. I think Vista performs "something" when the computer idles, otherwise it works fine. I'm still running RC1 though :(.
 

spyordie007

Diamond Member
May 28, 2001
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Could be a lot of things, as was recommended I suggest using the reliability and performance monitoring snap-in and/or an application like Process Explorer to see what is causing the I/O and to see how much I/O it's actually using (i.e. a handful of very small seeks or pushing a large amount of data).
 

ChronoReverse

Platinum Member
Mar 4, 2004
2,562
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Yeah, the Performance Monitor is awesome in Vista. It'll tell you how high the disk utilization is, how high the transfer rates are and which files exactly are being accessed.