Hey Vista, leave my god dam harddrive alone

[Agent]

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 () , 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
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

[Guy]

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!

[Agent]

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.

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

[Guy]

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!

[Cuffz]

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.

[Lucio]

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

[0iD]

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.

[lodore]

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.

[Ben Rogers]

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.

[Cuffz]

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.

[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.

[lodore]

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.

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.

[menthel]

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

[Cuffz]

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

[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.

[Bugbait]

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.