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

date posted 23rd April 2008 16:39

In the US, Sony charge $50 to take off all the dross before they ship a new
PC to you. Shocking!!


On 23/4/08 17:33, "David Clough" [EMAIL REMOVED] wrote:

>
> 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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