Hey Vista, leave my god dam harddrive alone

So I've been playing with Vista a few weeks again. Impressions? Since SP1 there has been a fairly big jump. There are quite a few features I like (UAC for example) and on the whole its not been a bad experience.

However, there is one thing which is constantly narking me off, and that's its inability to use my Harddrive correctly.

For example, I just loaded up Eve-Online. It loads almost instantly to the login screen. Great :) I'm putting in my password but the HD is still going mental....annoying as the characters that are being typed jump into place. Checking resource monitor and its reading a 2gig file in from UT3 that I was working with while modding last night.
Now I can understand the pre-caching thing and wanting to load stuff into memory in an attempt to pre-empt what I'm going to do, but seriously Vista, you choose the most stupid times to do it.
It is also supposed to only load it in its 'idle' time, but there have been several times when this just has plain not worked, reducing the system to a crawl. This isn't a isolated issue, as I have 2 machines here that do the same thing on very different hardware and after a Google, its clear I am not alone. Oh and yes, all drivers and up to date before anyone tries that old chestnut.

I tried it on a RAID0 array and I have to say that the difference between to and a single drive is phenomenal. It's not really the route I want to go down though.

Indexing is off, and its had long enough to index the drive even if it was on.

I've had a few other smaller issues, but most of them have been solved with registry edits and Googling. All apart from the one where Event Viewer totally failed and Microsofts official response was to reinstall the OS (On their newsgroups) to customers who rang up with the problem. Thankfully system restore sorted it out for me :)
I won't start on sound issues as thats a Creative thing.

Overall I'm not sure what to do now. I like Vista quite a lot. When its behaving its fast, stable, pretty (:embarrassed:) , and I've had no serious issues with most of the programs I use since SP1. I don't really want to go back to XP but its random inability to use my HD correctly is annoying me.

On a side note - does anyone elses hard drive make long, rapid reading noises during the boot sequence? The first time it was loading I thought the disk was going to fry :D
I did mirror the install to a different disk since the first one, just in case it was a disk issue.

So quite simply does anyone know how to turn this pre-caching thing off (Can't find anything on Google), I simply don't trust Vista to get it correct based on a few weeks of usage :(

With Vista, regularly during bootup and at other odd times, it sounds like my hard drives should have steam coming out of them!

Regularly it will take god knows how long to open the smallest of app\'s, under XP my system was stable, but more importantly ALOT faster.

Once ive moved again and got all my stuff sorted im bailing back to XP, ive been using Vista for a long while now, yes SP1 helped slightly but im still not impressed.

Atm I prefer to do more of my work off my laptop due to it having XP and me not having to wait for ever to do things!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rastamanblues

Regularly it will take god knows how long to open the smallest of app's, under XP my system was stable, but more importantly ALOT faster.

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Nice to hear I'm not alone on this. I noticed it quite a bit when things like Winamp seemed to take their time loading sometimes, yet Firefox and Photoshop was almost instant. Weird :(

Nope, regularly I worry that my hard drives will just die under the workout vista gives them.

For me firefox is fine, but yet Outlook, and i-tunes can take forever!

MMm some of the first things I did after installing vista: disabled Superfetch service (precaching feature in question), indexing and Readyboost service.. I'm not seeing any hdd wierdness or load time problems in comparison to XP :)

I have my hard drives suspended however and leds out of site so I can't comment on noise/activity outside of load times etc... I assume disabling superfetch and indexing is enough, right? :s

To me it looks like Superfetch is half baked and should not have been included in Vista or at least disabled by default until they've released a working version.

The weirdest performance issue I get under Vista appears to be related to the UAC and permissions. Certain shortcuts seem to get tagged as Administrator property (despite being on a User desktop), and woe betide if you try and do anything to them other than left click to launch, because it can take between 1 and 5 minutes to despond, during which time Explorer (including Internet Explorer) lock up. It's not massively common, as I find the offending icons and delete them and then replace them with my own shortcuts, but it's certainly annoying.


I personally haven't noticed any excessive HDD activity, but it might be due to the fact my drive is inside a case, and unless I push the case against the desk, it's inaudible. At the same time, my memory load is normally a fairly constant 38% but mostly that's due to Folding@Home running whenever my PC is on

The HDD activity under vista is intensely annoying, especially in the drives i have on my desk in eSATA caddies which i use for work. Noisy.

Hey Agent,
i know what you mean. i think all vista users have had the issue where it slows to a crawl and its using the hard drive so damn much!
it was worse before SP1.
i was trying a few disk imaging programs, if you run a more through antivirus program while the backup validates all the data the system comes to a complete crawl.
if you can reinstall windows xp i surgest you do so.
i still wish i could go back to windows xp but i cant because i dont have a xp license for my current maachine. with vista my quad core machine with 2Gb of ram can be slower than my old pc with a single core amd athlon 3200 with 1gb of ram.

yesterday i was beta testing the lastest mcafee enterprise beta and setup a folder rule to stop explorer from accessing a certain folder to test out how the folder rules worked.
it blocked access to the folder but then came up with a UAC prompt which allows you to overwrite the rule LOL.
you would think by now the issues would have been fixed.

What are the specs that you guys would say the minimum are for running Vista Ultimate?

I ran it (for two days, thats how much I could take of it) on a single core A64 @ 2907MHz and 1024MB of RAM and two 80 GB hard disks, independent not in RAID and it wasn't exactly fast and I noticed 512MB of RAM was used IDLE with NO programs running and I had tweaked a few services, that weren't needed.

I cant even imaging it would be useable on the above spec PC if I had have installed AV software and even a few programs that I would use like I do on XP.

It seemed stable enough though, as it failed to crash with the overclock that was stable in XP (Ive read Vista can be more picky when it comes to overclocks, and sometimes doesn't like the same overclock that XP ran with)

I got annoyed at Vista asking me if I was SURE if i was SURE I wanted to do something, nearly everything. However, I was told this can be disabled - true?

Is it the indexing 'feature' within Vista that makes the hard drive activity much higher than XP?

I noticed Vista took much longer to fully load than XP did on the same hardware.

They were just my first impressions, I didn't have the patience to use it for more than two days on my second system but I am getting tempted to give it another go sometime.

Min specs? Dual core 2ghz+, 2gb ram.. my integrated nvidia geforce 6150 is handling aero fine although I am running at 1024x768, most low end cards e.g. nvidia 8500GT will be great.

I got 8GB of RAM. Usually I don't use it for a while after booting so its pre populated all of the memory and I haven't had these problems you mention. I did when I had only 2GB RAM and to a lesser extent, 4GB RAM.

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Originally Posted by badass

I got 8GB of RAM. Usually I don't use it for a while after booting so its pre populated all of the memory and I haven't had these problems you mention. I did when I had only 2GB RAM and to a lesser extent, 4GB RAM.

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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.

Vista works fine on 2gb, it just scales the amount of precaching. I have very little disc accessing in my rig.

So people are against disabling Superfetch? :D
I've heard with 8gb ram it dosn't matter if you leave it and other stuff on, no problems.

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.

I only experienced similar issues when I was running Ultimate on 2Gig of RAM. There was a noticeable increase in performance at 4Gig (Swapfile off but Superfetch, Indexing, etc. all on) and again at 8Gig. I find Vista quite quick with 8Gig and zones in WoW load almost instantly in some situations (ie. Likely pre-cached). Even with XP I ran without a swapfile, makes things much faster if you have a lot of applications open simultaneously.

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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 ;)

Quote:

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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.

Even if the OS was writing to it 24/7 - its not really the OS's fault. Everything wear and tears.

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Originally Posted by Oobie-

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.

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Vista killed my mother, whilst linux raped my father.

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

Vista killed my mother, whilst linux raped my father.

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:o are you an apple man then?

no i hate all OS's (well except RISC OS 3 obviously!), it was more about taking hte piss out of the stupid comment.

Agent, are you sure it isn't/wasn't Windows Defender? It's the real hog in Vista. I disable each and every option in it. Indexing just settles down, and SuperFetch only really comes into affect after a week or 2 of work, and even then mainly just after the system has finished booting.

edit: grrr dammit, wrong thread :rolleyes:

I wish it was possible to tweak superfetch so it would ignore some directories and their contents. It does go a bit mad which gets annoying.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

Agent, are you sure it isn't/wasn't Windows Defender? It's the real hog in Vista. I disable each and every option in it. Indexing just settles down, and SuperFetch only really comes into affect after a week or 2 of work, and even then mainly just after the system has finished booting.

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windows defender wont even update anymore now, it just brings everything to a complete crawl and everything stops responding so as soon as the pc loads it gets exited, i should really tell it not to load when vista starts anymore, strange as it used to work great!

Use a proper AV than defender. Although the comments here remind me to disable it and see if that helps my home PC before I blow it away.

I'm really itching to go back to XP. The only issue is that I have no idea why.

Vista runs really smoothly. It just it seems...bloated. I installed XP the other day (on a separate partition) and it ran really well. It ran as quick as Vista yet had a much small footprint.

There are other little things that bother me. For instance I get an error when quitting TF2 (common issue) and it really annoys me. And old software such as quickpar suffer from memory leaks occasionally.

I just don't know what to do. The reasons for staying with Vista are; 4gb RAM and DX10 - but then I rarely use DX10.

I've had no problems with Vista Business x64 so far, other than being slightly less stable than XP it's fine. I have 4gb of RAM and my HDDs setup in RAID0, so it may be aleviating the problem for me, but I haven't noticed any of the performance problems mentioned in this thread.

Only thing I have disabled is UAC, got fed up with the 'are you sure?' everytime I tried to do anything. It my be good security practice, but I'd rather take the risk!

So its been almost 3 months since I made this thread- I thought an update is in order.

Quite simply, I've had enough. The boot-up time has got to the point of being nothing short of stupid compared to both XP and Ubuntu. I boot into the desktop of Vista and the HD's are reading / writing for the best part of 3 mins. In this time, using all but the most simple of applications is not possible.
I've killed all unneeded services, removed items from startup, all drivers are up to date and defragged. Its not an external application as using resource viewer clearly shows that the majority of reading / writing is going on in places that are OS protected (like the MFT).

Installing or uninstalling an application is hell. System restore brings the system to its knees. While a system restore was pretty quick on XP, I find it almost unusable on Vista.

I thought it may have been hardware related, so the HD has been swapped and the OS has been reinstalled a few times. I've tried every tweek I can find online to try and speed it up.

It's done. I admit defeat. I can simply not get this OS to behave as I want. It is always too busy doing what it thinks is best for me, which the majority of the time is wrong. I simply can not find one thing on Vista that is faster over XP....which is immensely annoying as I prefer Vista by far.
I'm falling back to XP for the time being. I simply can not deal with it any more :(

I loved you Vista. Why did you keep presenting me with an industrial size tub of Vaseline when all I wanted was a hug?

Boot time in vista is a problem for me too, need to sing and dance to the audience while my presentation loads from cold :/ .

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Originally Posted by DDY

Boot time in vista is a problem for me too, need to sing and dance to the audience while my presentation loads from cold :/ .

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Why, what is wrong with hibernate or standby? lol

I just cant stand the noise of the HD's constantly :S

I have 4GB Ram, do you all think 8GB Ram is the solution!?

Standby / S3 /STR (Suspend to RAM) still needs the RAM to be powered. On a laptop, it can be a waste in battery if travelling.

Agent did you disable the superfetch service?

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

Run this VBS script and let me know how bad that boot time really is

Code:

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Option Explicit
On Error Resume Next
Dim Wsh, Time1, Time2, Result, PathFile, MsgResult, MsgA, AppName, KeyA, KeyB, TimeDiff
MsgA = "Please close all running applications and click on OK."
KeyA = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\RestartTime\"
KeyB = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\RestartTime"
AppName = "ReBoot-Time"
Set Wsh = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
PathFile = """" & WScript.ScriptFullName & """"
Result = wsh.RegRead(KeyA & "Times")
if Result = "" then
MsgResult = Msgbox (MsgA, vbOKCancel, AppName)
If MsgResult = vbcancel then WScript.Quit
Wsh.RegWrite KeyA & "Times", left(Time,8), "REG_SZ"
Wsh.RegWrite KeyB, PathFile, "REG_SZ"
Wsh.Run "cmd /c Shutdown -r -t 00", false, 0
else
Wsh.RegDelete KeyA & "Times"
Wsh.RegDelete KeyA
Wsh.RegDelete KeyB
TimeDiff = DateDiff("s",Result,left(Time,8))
MsgBox "Your computer reboots in " & TimeDiff & " seconds", VbInformation, AppName
end if
wscript.Quit

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Save it as bootspeed.vbs and if you run it make sure you have autologin on otherwise logging in yourself adds to the time.

Have you gone through the tutorials at vistax64.com? I've tweaked my Vista and it's feeling smoother than pre-SP1. I don't feel like switching back to XP weirdly :D

If you've already removed it then oh well. Would be nice to see other users boot times too :D

* Although I say boot time it's reboot time but it's the easiest way to measure the time.
** Boot script nabbed from VistaX64.com

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?

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 :P

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.

Defender is off. The service isn't even running :(

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.

is the defender that useless so everyone disable it?

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Originally Posted by inonefly

is the defender that useless so everyone disable it?

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

Quote:

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Originally Posted by moogle

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

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Agent

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.

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Excuse my cheekyness for this next emoticon

:laugh:

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 :mrgreen:

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 :laugh:

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.

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 :(

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Agent

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

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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 :(

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Agent

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

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by moogle

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 :(

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

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.......

:)

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 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.


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.

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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*

Quote:

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

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

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I dunno I always have had is as a link instead :S

There's a Vista Myths page which says clearing your prefetch cache doesn't do much to speed up the PC, instead Vista starts re-caching what you've cleared.

I'm at a bit of a loss Agent. I can jump in and start using the PC the moment the start bar appears. :\

It's far easier than on XP, where you realistically need the boot to finish before you use things. That same process on Vista seems a lower priority here.

My laptop's a bit slower, but again faster than XP is on a desktop, despite the 5,400rpm drive.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

I'm at a bit of a loss Agent. I can jump in and start using the PC the moment the start bar appears.

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On XP you'd have the busy cursor while it was loading stuff up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

I'm at a bit of a loss Agent.

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Me too, and to say I'm annoyed with the entire Vista experience is an understatement.

I have no problem with the OS as such - as previously said, I prefer Vista by far over XP...It's just so slow compared to my XP partition.

I've tried every trick in the book. I honestly admit defeat.

Vista runs flawlessly for me. Very fast and access after boot is instant.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Koolpc

Vista runs flawlessly for me. Very fast and access after boot is instant.

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Thanks :D

Agent, this might sound a bit odd, but you could consider getting proper tech support from Microsoft. I'm not sure what is available, but if you have a legit copy of Vista then you must be entitled to something. If so, just make it their problem instead of yours. Explain all the problems and just let them try solutions and keep saying, "Nope" until it's fixed. My friend works for a company who has some kind of Microsoft support contract and they are surprisingly uber on the telephone with him, so they must have at least some clever people able to help. Whether you can get through to one or not, I dunno, but you can try.

Also, there is the knowledge base which I kind of hate, but has helped me a few times. I find it more annoying to search than the problems themselves, but you might be able to find something if you can motivate yourself to search it long enough.

Also, I saw some interesting links here:
http://www.google.com/search?source=...=Google+Search
If you can start going through them and reading it all, I suspect there would be a solution eventually. Whether it's worth doing that or not though, I dunno. I think I would just go back to XP, but there are reasons why I wanna stay on Vista.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

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.

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I'm not asking because of speed though, I was asking about it churning away slowly but constantly on peoples hard disks - as a noise concern. Mine isn't too bad, but it could be better. And my friends hard disk never shuts up. Even with nothing running, I can hear the hard disk chugging almost constantly.

OOoh I got that Noise thingy enabled on my hard drives could that be why I don't hear it much?

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Originally Posted by acrobat

Agent, this might sound a bit odd, but you could consider getting proper tech support from Microsoft. I'm not sure what is available, but if you have a legit copy of Vista then you must be entitled to something. If so, just make it their problem instead of yours.

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Thanks for the thought, but its not an option as its under the MSDN Academic licence (no support, its not retail).

I'm going to buy another HD and try a few things. Its just all the blinking hassle of reinstalling an OS.

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Originally Posted by Agent

I'm going to buy another HD and try a few things. Its just all the blinking hassle of reinstalling an OS.

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It's quick man! I cba taking mine out of the box to reinstall so I just put the install on a portable hd and it's super quick to install. Almost like installing on a VM.

Here's a guide if you want to try.

http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/c...38D!1665.entry

Only quirk is you need Vista in the first place :laugh:

I suppose if you have those RAID drivers it might slow it down but this speeds things up a teeny bit :)

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Originally Posted by moogle

It's quick man! I cba taking mine out of the box to reinstall so I just put the install on a portable hd and it's super quick to install. Almost like installing on a VM.

Here's a guide if you want to try.

http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/c...38D!1665.entry

Only quirk is you need Vista in the first place :laugh:

I suppose if you have those RAID drivers it might slow it down but this speeds things up a teeny bit :)

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Very interesting indeed.

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Originally Posted by moogle

OOoh I got that Noise thingy enabled on my hard drives could that be why I don't hear it much?

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Could be. I think my disk is especially loud. My computer is also especially quiet, almost silent in fact. So even the slightest noise is really clear. It's not too bad for me, but I do wonder sometimes what the frick Vista is doing to my disk when I'm just sitting staring at my desktop and I hear it doing something :p Mind of its own I tell ye. I blame SkyNet.

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Originally Posted by Agent

Thanks for the thought, but its not an option as its under the MSDN Academic licence (no support, its not retail).

I'm going to buy another HD and try a few things. Its just all the blinking hassle of reinstalling an OS.

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Looking at some of those links, it looks common so I would be inclined to blame Vista. But hopefully your new disk will help anyway.

Found out what it is. AAM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat...tic_Management

If you guys use the tool to read what setting you're at let us know if it was on high performance or low noise. Mind you your drive might not support it.