Hey Vista, leave my god dam harddrive alone

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Originally Posted by dangel

Why disable such a useful feature? I've not had any of these problems either, and i'd rather have all that spare, powered RAM doing something useful.

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I disabled it last night, and the HD access has been much better.

Do I want to disable it? No. Does disabling it make my system more responsive? Yup!
I'm not talking about about the odd thing here and there, I've noticed a big difference. Its no longer loading things into RAM when it shouldn't.

It's clear that from the replies in this thread and from the many many more on Google that something its doing is not right. The idea is great, but when its loading things and getting in the way of me doing what I want to do now, there are issues.

I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting it this far since release.

Well, I've not had the issue (on a number of systems) so I can't really comment on whether disabling it is the 'cure' - nor can we quantify the number affected (people only really post when they're upset etc). I'll agree Vista is 'chatty' hard drive wise but i haven't felt it's slowed me down whatsoever.

We obviously should all be using SSDs by now :p

So you can kill them quicker with all those read/writes? Greeeeaaat :D

Go to control panel, ther's an option for indexing in it. I have disabed indexing and UAC (don't start, it's my choice) and I love it, better than XP for me. :)

I think i need to play around with killing some of the Vista features when I get home.

I've lived with it for over a year and still don't really like it. UAC, Indexing and Superfetch might make a difference.

All in all, get XP :P It's just simply better ;)

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

I think i need to play around with killing some of the Vista features when I get home.

I've lived with it for over a year and still don't really like it. UAC, Indexing and Superfetch might make a difference.

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I've left UAC on as I quite like it :)

Disabling Indexing and Superfetch has made a big difference for me though :)

Just out of interest what chipset are you running, they have just confirmed something that we have known since the maxtor drive corruptions issues that the storage drivers in the nvidia chipsets are known to corrupt sata drives,
I havent experianced the nvidia chipsets under vista so i was curious to see if you were using nvidia or intel chipsets, with the view that that may be the cause of this extra activity with the precaching etc etc

Intel 965

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Originally Posted by lodore

so what your saying is that 2gb of ram isnt really enough for vista to work properly?
i cant use more than 4gb of ram on a 32bit operating system anyway.

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I'm not saying that exactily - Vista is fine on 2GB. Just that it's faster and works better with 4GB.

I think many of these problems could be fixed quite simply. As soon as another process asks for any kind of access to any of the disks, indexing and superfetch stop what they are doing for 10 seconds. As long as anything else has asked for HDD access within the past 10 seconds, Indexing and superfetch are leaving the disk alone.
Also, indexing could use the NTFS transaction logs to see which modifications have been made to the filesystem and keep track of them. In the quiet periods, it could only index things that have changed since it last ran.
These are both obvious, yet MS miss them. Why?
I suppose its like the fact that only after 2002 they actually made windows update work properly without requiring a reboot after installing each individual update to make sure they installed properly.

I disabled UAC as some of our work applications will not install or run using it. I haven't turned off anything else. Indexing makes my searches easier. I have an Athlon X2 4800 with 2GB RAM, and since SP1 Vista x64 has behaved itself. I had been using XP x64 for a while till it BSOD one too many times for me.

Vista runs quick and much smoother that what it did before the SP1. So I'm happy, now I just wish my E6600 with 4GB RAM at home would run a bit quicker. Seems sluggish compared to my work PC ...

Still using XP here and reading the overall feedback in this thread is certainly not inspiring me to "upgrade" any time soon.

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Originally Posted by dc72

Still using XP here and reading the overall feedback in this thread is certainly not inspiring me to "upgrade" any time soon.

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In all honesty, after the initial ballake of setting up Vista how I want it, its been smooth sailing.

Disabling the super-prefetch thing has made the system far more responsive. File copying is still slower than XP, but its no where near as bad as it was pre-SP1.

I see no reason to go back to XP at the moment as long as it keeps behaving :)

My friends hard drive died the other day, hes been using Vista for about a year now....I'm pretty sure its vista's fault.