RE: FN-FORUM: vista laptop - 45 mins disc activity when doing nothing

date posted 23rd April 2008 16:00

I do loads of computer repairs and optimisations for clients, the biggest
problem for speed on most new computers is the rubbish that they come
preinstalled with, mostly this consists of Norton 360 or similar or even
worse Macafee, if it's a Dell system then there's also about 5 different ISP
specific software packages, AOL being the worst of the lot of stealing
resources.

If you're hearing anything like a scratching or grinding sound from your
hard disk then it's not a software problem, your hard disk is most likely
damaged.

Vista has its failings but if you take off all the junk you'll find
underneath vista is actually quite zippy on a new machine :)




David Clough
[EMAIL REMOVED]
mobile: 07789 220 931

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL REMOVED] [EMAIL REMOVED] On Behalf Of
[EMAIL REMOVED]
Sent: 23 April 2008 4:56 PM
To: FN-FORUM / [EMAIL REMOVED]
Subject: Re: FN-FORUM: vista laptop - 45 mins disc activity when doing
nothing



>> i accessed the taskmanager and tried to arrange according to CPU most
were
>> 00 (which i assume is low) the only ones 02-05 were windows explorer and
>> taskmanager - so nothing malicious there

Explorer should not be doing much, and if taskmanager is running a lot then
there is a lot of swapping tasks in and out; each one may not take enough
CPU to show up.

>>
>> but this constant rythmic grinding every 1/3 second has been going on for

>> 1.5 hrs? and is v annoying to say the least and if it is slowing anything

>> down then that is a problem

If you are swapping tasks too much then this can result in excessive disk
activity and slow performance.

>>
>>
>> everything just dissapeared on the desktop and then returned - i was
>> updating windows (windows update)

That is usually Explorer dying and restarting.

I am not a Vista expert, I have avoided it so far, but a couple points worth
considering. ProcessMonitor from SysInternals (just google it) is useful to
try and show just what is causing all the activity. Check there is enough
virtual memory, and look for some of the notorious candidates e.g. Windows
Defender and Norton Security both of which I have had to remove from my XP
laptop to get anything like acceptable performance.

regards
Mike

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