Why does the hard drive run all the time???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Peter Naschke
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Peter Naschke

Does anyone have any idea what Vista is doing to access the hard drive
constantly??

....clickety-click,clickety-click...then more clickety-click...ad
nauseum!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Vista is rapidly turning out to be a very large collection of failures and
busted hopes...I've been wrestling with this installation for 5 days
now...the fun has definitely gone out of this unmitigated MESS.
 
I think that you might have a bad hard drive, which could explain why
Vista seems to be "a very large collection of failures and busted hopes"
 
Peter Naschke said:
Does anyone have any idea what Vista is doing to access the hard drive
constantly??
Click to expand...

Peter,

To monitor disk activity, open Reliability and Performance Monitor
(perfmon.exe) and click 'Disk' bar OR open Task Manager and add appropriate
columns on the 'Processes' tab.

I wonder if the noice is your only concern or if you have system slowdown
due to increased disk activity. It's not clear from your post.

I didn't monitor HDD access in Vista specifically (luckily enough I have a
silent HDD lol) but I wouldn't be surprised if Vista shows more disk
activity than XP. Builtin desktop search indexing, disk defrag etc - these
background tasks can result in increased disk activity.

The upside is that Vista introduces IO prioritization which means that
running defrag at low IO priority in the background does not affect desktop
performance much so you can continue using computer as usual. It will take
more time for background task to complete however (which confused many
people who would start defrag in Vista manually, then wait [as they do in
XP] for it to end for hours and then complain "It's so slow!").
 
because vista is not designed very well?

they have added various stupid things that use the disk all the time! oohh
god... I can make a 4 hour documentary explaining WHY vista is so bad....

I would need 4 hours to explain all the problems!
 
MicroFox said:
I can make a 4 hour documentary explaining WHY vista is so bad....
I would need 4 hours to explain all the problems!
Click to expand...

Please take your time, I'd love to read it.
 
I have found 2 things that you can do to stop it...
1. You need to open your Services panel (Control Panel->Admistrative
Tools->Services) and Stop and disable "Windows Search".
Why? If you notice on your start menu you will see a search bar. This is
very simliar to Windows Desktop Search for XP. It indexes your files so that
you can search for files easier. While you are not at your pc, it indexes.
2. (Not recommended, but if you really want to)... You need to navigate to
your system settings (Control Panel->System->System Protection), uncheck
your drives.
Why? Vista creates system restore points so that if something goes wrong
(bad drivers for example), you can reset your settings back to what it was
before.

I hope that helps
 
Vista IS doing many things in the background... On one of test machines,
there's a good comparision: same applications started under XP and Vista, and
after 1-2 hours: HDD temperature in XP: 42C, while in vista: 58C :)
Reasons: background indexing, bacground defrag, maybe small RAM amount
(pagefile frequent contact). Try to turn off some features, and check the
results.
 
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