Hey Vista, leave my god dam harddrive alone

[Brewster0101]

Been using vista for a little over 9 months and at first had the usual hard drive issues. And as most people have mentioned, I've disabled indexing, superfetch etc etc. All seems ok. Boot up time is ok. The only time my boot up time goes well over a few minutes is if I have my external Western Digital hard drive on. There is an issue with some external drives and vista.

On the whole vist is alot slower than XP though. Networking is a pain, and simple programs do take a while to load sometimes, ie firefox.

So why did Microsoft release Vista? Why do we continue to use it? Why don't I revert back to XP 64 which for me was fine!!! Why oh why?

[acrobat]

Does everyones hard drives still churn even after turning indexing and superfetch off? Mine does but I'm not sure if it's much worse than XP. I definitely have a slower boot up and slower to load programs too sometimes. I put up with that though, but I'd rather it not happen

[this_is_gav]

As already said in this thread, the real hog I find in Vista is Windows Defender. I just turn it all off.

Neither SuperFetch or Indexing slow things down for me. SuperFetch is only active once the initial boot period is completed, and is low priority, and Indexing immediately stops the moment the hard drive is accessed for more than a second or so, and once the initial index is built, it's hardly active anyway.

[Agent]

Defender is off. The service isn't even running

[moogle]

Defender is off, Superfetch is on but for apps only, prefetch is on for boot files only. system restore off and all these other tweaks I've done. So far I've managed to whittle down my reboot time (from that script) to 58 seconds. Which isn't as bad as I thought and as for the disk I hardly notice the thrashing about. Next time it's on I'll turn the fans down to hear but when the fans were down I didn't notice it.

[inonefly]

is the defender that useless so everyone disable it?

[moogle]

is the defender that useless so everyone disable it?

Idk I just disable stuff that I don't use. I wouldn't rely on it heavily to keep me protected though.

[Agent]

Also about your boot time, just how long is it?

Script says: Your computer reboots in 187 seconds

Now a fair bit of that is the BIOS and RAID array doing its stuff, but from the time the windows loading screen shows its still silly compared to other OSs.

[moogle]

Script says: Your computer reboots in 187 seconds

Now a fair bit of that is the BIOS and RAID array doing its stuff, but from the time the windows loading screen shows its still silly compared to other OSs.

Excuse my cheekyness for this next emoticon



Wow 187. I've got my BIOS logo off and quickboot straight to hard drive on. It detects the 4 SATA components then it's off to Windows. It's like 15-10 secs are BIOS only I'll time it when my PC is back together, but still it is along time. The max I had was 90 secs untweaked. Something definately wrong there. I'll try the reboot time on this PC and check how long the BIOS takes.

Update:

Well I timed the BIOS from the time the screen started up (VGA POST) till I saw the Windows Boot Screen loading and it was 10 seconds for me here. Total time was 71 seconds with me frantically typing my password

Could possibly be because of the RAID or the different setup maybe? That is a really bad boot time. My friends Windows XP got messed up so bad his boot up time was 10 minutes. I remember going there we'd switch it on then go on the Playstation for some rounds of Tekken till it booted

Have you reinstalled it or is this the one and only install you've done? It's kind of hard to pinpoint whats slowing the bootup down but if you boot into safe mode you can see the list of drivers being loaded and see which one stays the longest on screen. crcdisk is the only one which takes a long time to load but maybe you might find a different driver in there.

[Agent]

I'm going to try a few various things tomorrow, including logging the boot time after the BIOS (I have no issue with the BIOS taking its time), but I'm going to leave it for tonight otherwise its going to end up on the patio, hehe

Boot time to one side, it still doesn't excuse the annoying HD access that can get fairly constant sometimes

[Emirzan]

Reading through this thread raises yet more issues, and confirmations of issues that I already knew about, with vista, arghh... I'm half-way between upgrading and not bothering. The major plus being that I'd have a 64-bit operating system and I really want to be able to use more than 4Gb of RAM. But then there are so many many problems reported, even with SP1, is it really worth it?

I just can't decide, bah, I can't stand microsoft. Shame they have a monopoly on operating systems (that actually run useful software/games). I really really hate computer noise and pointless HDD seeking sounds like something that would drive me up the wall. Guess that's a no on vista for the moment at least.

[moogle]

Boot time to one side, it still doesn't excuse the annoying HD access that can get fairly constant sometimes

How long does the HD seeking last? I had my fans turned down but that was after the PC being on for a few days. I've yet to hear it

Vista's all good but the only niggle I'm having with it is those bloody huge Control Panel icons. Can't set them to my own size

[this_is_gav]

Slow boot times are usually entirely dependant on hardware drivers. Primarily USB devices awakening. WinXP can have exactly the same issue.

It's why XP boots in about 10 seconds (from the BIOS) on a fresh install, but can take a 40 seconds or more when you've installed nothing but certain drivers.

Boot time to one side, it still doesn't excuse the annoying HD access that can get fairly constant sometimes

If you do have a loud HDD, then I can appreciate why Vista can be irritating. It's not much of a concern with the majority of recent HDDs though.

Vista's all good but the only niggle I'm having with it is those bloody huge Control Panel icons. Can't set them to my own size

If you're using it through the Start Menu, why not set the Control Panel as a menu rather than a link?

[fuddam]

FWIW: vista64 biz. self install on laptop (C2D 2.4). 2GB. Runs smooth. Noticed unusual HDD activity before SP1 but not since. All services running as per install, ie UAC, WD, superfetch etc. Faster to login than one of my xp machines, similar to other. I likes it.

gotta wonder.......

[Taz]

One thing Vista does straight after you boot up and log in is check for Windows Updates. This slows the machine down for a few minutes and things appear sluggish. The Windows Update check is quite disk and CPU intensive. It should operate at normal speed after a few minutes.

I, too, notice my HDD light on a lot of the time! I do regularly clean out the prefetch cache using CCleaner. Vista (64-bit) takes full advantage of lots of RAM and will attempt to fill up unused RAM with prefetch data.

[Agent]

Slow boot times are usually entirely dependant on hardware drivers. Primarily USB devices awakening. WinXP can have exactly the same issue.

It's why XP boots in about 10 seconds (from the BIOS) on a fresh install, but can take a 40 seconds or more when you've installed nothing but certain drivers.


If you do have a loud HDD, then I can appreciate why Vista can be irritating. It's not much of a concern with the majority of recent HDDs though.

I've tried a fresh install with no drivers, and then adding drivers. The difference isn't really worth mentioning.
The computer downstairs (purely Vista MCE for TV) which has no apps installed over what's needed to make media centre work is just as bad. Every bit of hardware in it is different to this machine and the slow boot issue and insane reading time during boot up is still there.

Its not just the noise of the HD, its the fact that I can't really do *anything* in the period of a few mins after its booted. The system just grinds to a halt. Like I say, this is present on 2 systems in my house, both entirely different hardware so I find it hard to blame any particular part.

It still doesn't explain the random jumps to life and writing to the HD for a prolonged period when I'm trying to actually use the OS. As above, looking at resource viewer shows that its usually always writing / reading from system protected areas, which means it can be very little other than the OS itself *shrug*