Beginners Guides: Stopping Vista From Thrashing Hard Disks to Death

CDsDontBurn

While your PC may be doing nothing, all of a sudden you notice the hard drives are trashing around like the entire drive is being copied. Never fear, PCSTATS is here to help you stop Windows Vista from excessive hard drive usage, and show you how to free up some disk space too! - Version 1.0.0

Source: PC Stats

__________________

Zelig

There's stuff in that guide that can be useful in certain circumstances, but following everything outlined there is definately a bad idea. Disabling superfetch is going to hurt performance, and disabling defragmenting can actually increase disk thrashing.

__________________
--

MitchRapp

Things I did as soon as I installed vista x64

- Install only necessary applications
- Create 1-size swap file
- Remove indexing everywhere except Outlook and Start Menu
- Disabled "ARE U SURE LOLZ" messages that always popped up (UAC?)
- Installed a good defragger (Perfect Disk) and disabled vista's defrag
- Cleaned up files on the PC and removed useless stuff
- Disable completely useless services (Windows Media Center stuff, Fax, etc...)
- Defrag.

I'm probably forgetting some ... but yeah

Zelig

While neither of these are likely to hurt, they aren't going to help much either.

Unused services are automatically paged out of ram if the memory is needed, and if they're not being used, they aren't taking any cpu time either.

Vista has a static pagefile by default, which is equal to the installed memory in your system. If you make a static pagefile manually, and the pagefile fills up, it's then unable to expand, resulting in crashes, etc. The best thing to do in general with the pagefile is just to set it as system managed on every drive where a pagefile is acceptable to have.

__________________
--

MitchRapp

I'd rather set the size myself... but considering I have 4 gigs of RAM I don't really see how my page file will ever be used...
As for services, I hate having useless ones on "auto" ... disable !

Zardon

more utter rubbish about vista.

calidan

I fail to see how this article is rubbish. Sure the title needs some work but all he is pointing out is services that aren't needed for the average user that can be turned off.

__________________
Steam Community :: ID :: calidan



"Don't try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie.... Study computers instead." - Jackie Chan

Zelig

Turning them off also provides no benefit to the average user however, and can result in broken functionality.

__________________
--

calidan

Broken functionality? Dude, I have those two features (Superfetch & Windows Search) completely removed from Vista and it works just fine. Disabling them will not break anything. You can still search just fine without it and programs continue to load. Nothing is broken. The benefit is the hard drive is not being accessed when it shouldn't be in the first place.

__________________
Steam Community :: ID :: calidan



"Don't try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie.... Study computers instead." - Jackie Chan

Zelig

Not those two services specifically, but services in general, there are problems all over the web resulting from people disabling services they shouldn't have.

"Shouldn't" is taking it too far, superfetch provides performance benefits, and will be useful for the vast majority of people.

__________________
--

Zardon

Hey if some of you want to think this article is fine and spiffy, thats cool by me, im just sick reading utter rubbish with sensationalist titles..... with the sole intention to get hits - ("thrashing hard drives to death", i mean seriously). I could get into it further but ive been in many of these threads discussing things in the past, and all I get out of them is a headache.

mkk

Thrashing to death - Cute, what's next - Stop Vista from raping your PC?

Turning off Windows Search - Good idea for those who don't make advanced file searches several times a day, unless the system has plenty of RAM because then you won't save much by turning it off either. I do this on principle.

Turning off automatical defragmentation being run once a week - Bad idea unless you're installing a third party defragmenter. Vistas defragmentation routine is an improvement and the automated once-a-week process is running in such a low priority mode that you probably won't notice it's there. Since it does not automatically restart if interuppted (by a reboot or so) until the next week, users may even want to increase the frequency a little or perhaps add a separate schedule for the system drive.

Turning off Windows Defender - Well maybe if you have a solid antivirus solution that you can rely upon. But keeping Windows Defender on together with Kaspersky Antivirus has not been bothersome on this system. Windows Defender also ends itself when it's done.

Turning off Superfetch - Only on a system that is really low memory like 1GB of less could Superfetch be counterproductive. Otherwise it will make a difference for the starting time of your most often running major applications or games. Try putting this service on Delayed Start if you think that the systems harddrive has a little too much to do right away at bootup, then Superfetch will wait for the system to start idling before it kicks in.

Modifying the pagefile - Sure, this is an age old topic that hasn't essentially changed with Vista. Except perhaps that Vista can in some situations start closing applications with a "not enough memory" message when it deems that the pagefile is too small and the user has set an insufficient upper limit. So take care when trying to use a small pagefile while playing memory hungry games. (this may or may not have improved with SP1, but I'd say be generous in size and place the pagefile on another drive, or don't touch this at all)

Reducing the recycle bin - As long as you understand that setting a low value here may end up defeating the purpouse of the recycle bin. When deleating some huge image file that you know you don't need to restore, press Shift-Delete to circumvent the bin. Nothing new here.

Lower system restore space usage - Can certainly be a good idea if you use that 500GB drive with everything on just one partition. Here on my 40GB system partition I actually raised the alotted system restore space, as it's a great thing to have at the right time and 15% out of a 40GB drive isn't much space for system restore to store files under Vista. Kudos to PCSTATS for describing the method for changing this setting, but their 2GB value won't be able to hold much. You might want more the one or two very latest restore points showing up when you're in trouble.

Turning system restore off completely - Sure if you're on a slow system and don't mind losing the safety feature. Perhaps you should be running XP instead?

Judas

i'm a fan of disabling system restore..... for myself....

xp system restore has been destroyed.. it no longer is a safe measure.. vista is alot more secure for that department..

nothing like watching a virus assume controll of xp restore... and then royalling screwing over the system when you attempt to roll back.

__________________

BlueMak

In that case it is not the fault of the system restore of XP, but your antivirus program.

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Judas

that's true......

but what i find is that system restore is the first thing to not work properly.....

__________________

Zardon

depends on the virus. having no antivirus software is a recipe for disaster, I don't think you can blame a specific OS functionality failure after being exploited due to user carelessness.

Judas

no...

but considering the users that have had fully up to date norton/mcafee (erg to both)... or nod32 and still getting infected ..... i've yet to see a case where system restore has yet to solve any of the other major problems that a virus hasn't touched yet...

It's beyond irritating to the user when the system restore runs through.. reboots and then go "System restore was unable to go back to the select restore point" ...

__________________

Zardon

Which users are you referring to here Judas? i have never known anyone to have had issues with viruses affecting system restore. Is this a common issue you have read about or seen first hand in your store? As for mcafee antivirus, I think its virtually a virus itself so im sure its probably the program that causes the issues with the system in the first place.

I would class myself as having access to a lot of hardware and system and ive never seen any issues with system restore being targeted by viruses or high end clients like avast or norton coorporate failing to stop an attack of this level. Personally I always turn restore off on my own machines but ive known it to help some ill educated family members in time of crisis.

Judas

yeah... the moment i see mcafee... i have a tendancy to hover over the removealll button... but i gotta wait for the ok from the cusomter first lol..


as the the restore feature.... i've seen first hand, with a Nod32 protected system first... where the system restore feature was comprimised...

if you attempt to do a restore.. it would appear to go throug the process flawlessly.... even to the ealiest of dates...

the result was upon bootup, the system would bring up weird messages, spam and crap like crazy about downloading programs to resolve this and that... and this is to a restore date that was before anything of the sort even appeared....

what's really interesting.. the system would be clear before hand..

and then the system restore would fail to completely the operation..

this is why i typically disable it for xp now... as it lately seems to be causing more grief then solving problems.....

vista however... is a different story.. seems to be working well.


i've only seen 3 cases... it could be specific to a shared interest in a specific download/website... mistake on the users part or who knows...

i know the recent messenger viruses were a nasty mix...

__________________