hi folks, i've been using vista fairly intensively for development for
the last 6 months, and overall i am really pleased with it. however,
one thing bothers me that was never a problem with XP.
at the end of the day, i close down all my instances of VS 2005 and
SQL Studio, Outlook, Firefox etc., and it literally takes minutes for
the apps to close and for the drive to calm down. i try closing them
nicely one at a time waiting a few seconds between each one, but the
disk I/O is so intense that each app often spend about 30 seconds in
an unresponsive state while closing. other apps that i'm not trying
to close remain responsive during all this disk activity. my system
score is about 5 and i have a 10K RPM Raptor drive, 2 gigs of DDR800
RAM etc., i have most of the defaults enabled like SuperFetch etc.
i noticed another post here a month ago from a guy who said he
measured his page file activity on closing many apps and he reported
similar problems, saying that XP had much less pagefile activity when
closing apps compared to vista.

by the way, the disk IO is not related to source control with Visual
Studio, it is the same as working on VS solutions not under source
control.

as an experiment, i have disabled virtual memory, which i know is not
recommended, but i'm just going to give it a try for a week or so to
see how it goes.

does this happen everyone else? is there anything i can do to ease
the problem? normally i would just live with it, but today it was
really bad and it took me almost 5 minutes of just sitting there
closing down apps. my RAM usage is typically 70%.

thanks for any tips
tim