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Performance and Maintainance of Windows Vista A forum for performance and maintenance tasks in Windows Vista. (microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintainance) |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
Bad tip, as is disabling the paging file (unless of course you like 'out of
memory' errors and slow performance). -- Best of Luck, Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/ Windows help - www.rickrogers.org My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com "Ursa" wrote in message ... Forgot to mention that I've turned off my paging file too found the superfetch tip in another forum. But I'll turn that one back on. -- Ursa |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
Well there is one thing a lot of us forget. Most of us have more than one computer and therefore have a router. Routers generally have a firewall. If we do nothing it tends to protect us. If no router is present then you need to look to see if your drive activity is because the computer is somehow compromised. Yes Vista (Allegedly) has a "Firewall" but despite MS' best efforts if Vista is compromised then the Vista firewall also is vulnerable. ronnie wrote: Atleast I am not alone, on this. I also found the virus program, spy program, etc doesn't matter if they are off. The problem still happens. Although common sense says this, it can't be left out. The drive can't be scanned for errors. You get a "drive can't be scanned when in use." Right now the accessing has been giong on for almost a week. The version used is vista basic. With posting what they are microsoft may need to look into this. Even indexing is off. "Charlie Tame" wrote: rbd wrote: For the past few weeks I have been attempting to create a Vista Home Premium configuration on a new Core 2 Duo PC. I though that I had finally created a stable config with all the proper hardware drivers and many of my apps. I then noticed that the disk activity light was on solid - and I couldn't figure out why. I ran a number of process tools, the only one that seemed to provide useful information being Perfmon. Perfmon showed two distinct types of disk activity. The first, was causing the disk activity light to stay on solid, and was caused by the reading of files on my D: data disk. I found that by stopping/starting the SysMain Superfetch service I can turn off/turn on this constant disk read activity. It appears that Superfetch looks through previously opened user data files - even if they were used only once, are 4+GB in size, and may never be used again from within VISTA. It is beyond my comprehension what possible good this type of activity would do me, or any other VISTA user. After I get to the point where I've installed Lightroom/Photoshop/Picasa/PaperPort and other apps that routinely access and/or index GB of user files - will access to my D: drive ever stop? Why would Superfetch bother with non-executable data files on a non-system partition? After reading the MS VISTA Kernel description I know that turning off SuperFetch will impact certain VISTA features - so what?. Second issue: I noticed a secondary disk activity that consists of continuous writes to various files on C: that occur at the rate of a few each second. Again, I attempted to isolate that IO activity with Perfmon, including noting the PIDs and then attempting to stop the Applications with that PID - with no success. In an attempt to further diagnose the issues, I restored a C: partition backup for the first OOTB Vista configuration (no updates, drivers, apps installed). The steady drone of repeated disk writes to C: also occurs in that base build. The disk writes involves areas such as: files lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat from svchost LocalSystemNetworkRestricted. c:\windows\system32\config\SOFTWARE c:\$Logfile (NTFS Volume Log) c:\windows\System32\config\DEFAULT from System This is my only Vista system, so I have none other to compare it to. I've turned off Indexing, turned off Defender, uninstalled AVG, turned off disk defrags, and disabled all items in the Scheduler - the C: disk activity goes on. I find all this disk IO activity unwanted, distracting, and possibly damaging to disk drive health in the long term. I don't understand why this type of activity should be necessary for a single-user desktop PC and why it is so darned difficult to determine what is causing it. I'd appreciate any assistance in explaining what this constant disk C: write activity might be, what other diagnostic tools I could use to isolate the causes, and how to stop it (other than to install WINXP or buy a Mac). You could try right clicking on the dis drive icon and in properties turn off "Index this drive..." whatever. Seems like that made a difference fo me, and since I rarely use "Search" functions the indexing time is just wasted. |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
Rick - thank you for your reply.
Definitely not excessive paging - just read activity to very specific data files and write activity to very specific VISTA files. I'll gladly turn Superfetch back on if anyone tell me how to keep it from reading through every data file that I've ever opened - including 5+GB data and backup files. So far, disabling Superfetch has only made things much better. (Unless Perfmon and my disk activity light are lying.) Rick Rogers wrote: Hi, More likely excessive paging, and disabling superfetch only makes it worse. |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
whoa.... actually I had 1 user connected to my computer when I disabled my shared folders. I thought I was safe since I live out in the country (and no other houses in the vicinity) but I guess the internet makes us all unsafe :/ Hope this helps.... this crazy disk is making me crazy too! -- Ursa |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
I too am new to Vista and was having the same problems as above. I don't know exactly what the service "SERVER" is for, but, i can tell you that when i disabled that service and rebooted, all the excessive disk read problems i had disappeared and my boot and shutdown times became lightning fast. -- vistaHead ------------------------------------------------------------------------ vistaHead's Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/member.php?u=53049 View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=974285 http://forums.techarena.in |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
I too am new to Vista and was having the same problems as above. I don't
know exactly what the service "SERVER" is for, but, i can tell you that when i disabled that service and rebooted, all the excessive disk read problems i had disappeared and my boot and shutdown times became lightning fast. ..... It looks like service SERVER is important. http://www.speedyvista.com/services2.html |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
I'm seeing this too. I noticed it after I set Power Options-Advanced
Settings- Hard Disk-Turn Off Hard Disk After to 5 minutes on a new laptop and found that the hard disk keeps running indefinitely. Reliability and Performance monitor shows that six files, including C:\$Logfile and C:\$Mft, get written to every few seconds like a heartbeat, even when the system is fully idle. I searched the web and found only one forum thread that has relevant information: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=243342 The last entry by Shyster1 is the most informative, but still doesn't explain why the "heartbeat" writes are necessary. This behavior raises some questions: 1) Does forcing the system drive to run constantly make sense from a system responsiveness/performance point of view? In other words, would the user be annoyed by having to wait for the system drive to spin up every now and again? 2) Does it make sense to display the "Turn off Hard Disk After" power option in systems that have only one (system) drive? Does this feature affect external USB drives for instance? If it only applies to internal hard drives, then it shouldn't show if a system has only one drive. 3) If the "Turn off Hard Disk After" power option actually worked for the system drive, would Vista be significantly more energy efficient than it is? Since hard drives draw a fair amount of power, I'm guessing the answer is yes. There's an obvious trade off here between energy efficiency and usability (i.e. #1 above), but perhaps users should be allowed to decide what is best for them. "rbd" wrote: For the past few weeks I have been attempting to create a Vista Home Premium configuration on a new Core 2 Duo PC. I though that I had finally created a stable config with all the proper hardware drivers and many of my apps. I then noticed that the disk activity light was on solid - and I couldn't figure out why. I ran a number of process tools, the only one that seemed to provide useful information being Perfmon. Perfmon showed two distinct types of disk activity. The first, was causing the disk activity light to stay on solid, and was caused by the reading of files on my D: data disk. I found that by stopping/starting the SysMain Superfetch service I can turn off/turn on this constant disk read activity. It appears that Superfetch looks through previously opened user data files - even if they were used only once, are 4+GB in size, and may never be used again from within VISTA. It is beyond my comprehension what possible good this type of activity would do me, or any other VISTA user. After I get to the point where I've installed Lightroom/Photoshop/Picasa/PaperPort and other apps that routinely access and/or index GB of user files - will access to my D: drive ever stop? Why would Superfetch bother with non-executable data files on a non-system partition? After reading the MS VISTA Kernel description I know that turning off SuperFetch will impact certain VISTA features - so what?. Second issue: I noticed a secondary disk activity that consists of continuous writes to various files on C: that occur at the rate of a few each second. Again, I attempted to isolate that IO activity with Perfmon, including noting the PIDs and then attempting to stop the Applications with that PID - with no success. In an attempt to further diagnose the issues, I restored a C: partition backup for the first OOTB Vista configuration (no updates, drivers, apps installed). The steady drone of repeated disk writes to C: also occurs in that base build. The disk writes involves areas such as: files lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat from svchost LocalSystemNetworkRestricted. c:\windows\system32\config\SOFTWARE c:\$Logfile (NTFS Volume Log) c:\windows\System32\config\DEFAULT from System This is my only Vista system, so I have none other to compare it to. I've turned off Indexing, turned off Defender, uninstalled AVG, turned off disk defrags, and disabled all items in the Scheduler - the C: disk activity goes on. I find all this disk IO activity unwanted, distracting, and possibly damaging to disk drive health in the long term. I don't understand why this type of activity should be necessary for a single-user desktop PC and why it is so darned difficult to determine what is causing it. I'd appreciate any assistance in explaining what this constant disk C: write activity might be, what other diagnostic tools I could use to isolate the causes, and how to stop it (other than to install WINXP or buy a Mac). |
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Did anyone find a solution to this problem? Maybe we all have something in common with this problem?
Samsung HD 250gb 7200RPM I'm on a Dell XPS 1530 What else might be a factor? I use Verizon Fios I have a logitech wireless mouse v320 I have logitech speakers I have 4gb of ram but im on 32 bit vista so only 3.5 is used. Anyone? |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
With increasing CPU speed and multiple kernels the disk has become the real bottleneck. It is strange Microsoft engineers does not acknowledge this and make system software that minimize diskusage! I found turning off indexing and Superfetch/ReadyBoost made my hardisk calm just within a few seconds after boot and thats great. The cyclic writes to C:\$LogFile(NTFS Volume log), C:\$Mft(NTFS...) and logfiles in C:\Windows\System32\config directory I haven't found a way to turn off. It is probably not possible. They cause a contionus approximate write load of 10-20 KB/sec. I hope Microsoft adds an option were logging can be customized and eventually turned off. -- l-o-g-o ------------------------------------------------------------------------ l-o-g-o's Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/members/l-o-g-o.htm View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/windows-v...nce/974285.htm http://forums.techarena.in |
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Vista Excessive Disk Activity
Vista made my HP HDX-18 laptop (quad-core, 4GB, 1TB) virtually unusable. It came to unstoppable disk abuse, making, for instance, impossible to connect any large external hard drive. The Performance monitor shows that system is all the time busy with writing to files in the "System Volume Information" folder. Switching off the "system restore" helps: "Start menu" - Right click on "Computer" - Properties - Advanced Settings - System Protection ... Uncheck all boxes. I'm wondering with the following: Toyota recall cars and patches them for free if any production defect is discovered. Vista is mainly made of defects, but I have to pay for an upgrade to "7". -- vosuram ------------------------------------------------------------------------ vosuram's Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/members/160032.htm View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/windows-v...nce/974285.htm http://forums.techarena.in |