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    Help! Vista is thrashing my hard drive to bits!

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by Riebart, May 7, 2008.

  1. Riebart

    Riebart Notebook Enthusiast

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    I've disabled Search and Indexing, Windows Defender, and I've tried disabling both the SuperFetch and ReadyBoost services, but nothing stops this!

    From when the computer boots up to when it shuts down there is about 1-5Mb/s of disk activity (Occasionally going as high as 15-20). I can't figure it out, and it's destroying performance.

    Any suggestions?

    Oh: And I've made sure it isn't an auto-defrag as well.

    One more piece of info: Almost all of the disk access appears to be to my user's userclass.dat file...I can't figure out what is going on.
     
    Riebart, May 7, 2008
    #1
  2. surfasb

    surfasb Titles Shmm-itles

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    userclass.dat is part of your profile and registry. Since it doesn't load the whole darn thing into memory, the OS just load parts of it as it needs to.

    Disk usage is normal even during idle times. In fact, I rather the OS make use of it's idle time.

    Without knowing more about your computer, we can only speculate at best.
     
    surfasb, May 7, 2008
    #2
  3. Tinderbox (UK)

    Tinderbox (UK) BAKED BEAN KING

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    Hi.

    I would turn off your virus killer and see if that helps.

    If not run msconfig, and disable all unnecessary startup items, even disable them all.

    Regards

    John.
     
    Tinderbox (UK), May 7, 2008
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  4. Riebart

    Riebart Notebook Enthusiast

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    I don't install an anti-virus, so that isn't the issue. This is an essentially clean install so a virus is highly unlikely.

    As for the "Os making use of it's idle time", I suppose that's nice, but I'd rather it be idle when it is idle. Plus, this is severely impacting performance. I tried to run 3DMark06 and was getting an average of about 5 FPS for a good portion of it during the Proxycon test. Since the Usrclass.dat file is only 1.9Mb, why not just load it all into memory.

    System Specs (Alienware m15x)
    Core 2 Duo T9300 @ 2.5Ghz
    4Gb 4-4-4-12 PC5300
    160Gb Hybrid drive
    512Mb 8800M GTX

    Normally I wouldn't care, but the noise is going to drive me nuts, and I worry what it will behave like when I'm on battery.
     
    Riebart, May 7, 2008
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  5. surfasb

    surfasb Titles Shmm-itles

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    if you are getting that kind of sever drop in fps, it's going to be something else besides your HD access. HD access doesn't make that kind of impact of FPS. Sounds like a software issue. What driver version are you using.?
     
    surfasb, May 7, 2008
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  6. Riebart

    Riebart Notebook Enthusiast

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    The one that shipped with it. I ran 3DMark when got it (Thankfully made and image of the stock setup, I'll get to that in a moment), 167.55 I believe. It's AW's.

    I am not sure what caused it, but I restored my old 'clean' ghost image that I made right after booting it up for the first time, and it doesn't happen there...Which is odd. I'll have to find out what caused it. Then again I did enable the Hybrid Disk Power Savings feature this time...I'll have to try that.
     
    Riebart, May 7, 2008
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  7. surfasb

    surfasb Titles Shmm-itles

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    Glad you could figure out the problem.
     
    surfasb, May 7, 2008
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  8. Riebart

    Riebart Notebook Enthusiast

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    Well, I kind of solved it. Problem is I haven't figured it out yet. Hah. I still don't know why it started in the first place. I'll be working on that today apparently. I'll post back when I figure it out.
     
    Riebart, May 7, 2008
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  9. Wirelessman

    Wirelessman Monkeymod

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    While the problem was on, did you look with TM what was going on?
     
    Wirelessman, May 7, 2008
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  10. Budding

    Budding Notebook Virtuoso

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    Sounds like a malicious process to me. Enable Windows Defender and see it comes up with anything. Also check in Task Manager, as Wirelessman suggested, to see if there is a process causing these read/writes.
     
    Budding, May 7, 2008
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  11. deputy963

    deputy963 Notebook Evangelist

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    The free version of Anvir Task Manager is a great little replacement for the Windows Task Manager. Download it and see which process is accessing your disk. http://www.anvir.com/

    Should take about 60 seconds to see what your problem is.
     
    deputy963, May 8, 2008
    #11