WinXP slows down, access HD like crazy for VM until system is out of r


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It seems that the WinXP Pro machines that I and several of my friends have work fine on bootup and even if they don't touch, after approximately a day or so, the HDD is heavily accessed and then the system is slow as molasses accessing the VM and it will continue to access the VM until all the resources on the system is used up and the only thing is to either shutdown or reboot. Anyone know what's causing this? Since all the systems have between 512megs to 1gig of ram.

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I would guess it happens when you enter a folder of a big media file (divx or something). if the media file is corrupted in any way, or incomplete, windows will try to parse the info from it. press ctrl+alt+del and kill explorer.exe. then open a nw instance of explorer in the "task managers" menu (file->new taslk (run))

-carpe

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I'll give that a shot next time since I just rebooted as the problem was occuring when I made the post. Is there anyway to find out what actually causes it? If I kill explorer, would it kill everything in the system tray?

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Windows XP comes with a background program that will defragment your hard drive after a period of idleness. It is turned on by default and I know I disabled it on mine because it no longer pesters me. If I remember how I disabled it, I'll let you know -- but at least you have some kind of idea what might be causing it.

- Alien Venom

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Interesting. I never had this problem with the Beta or the RC's for WinXP Pro as I had the same exact setup and config on my desktop and notebook but can that process really use up all the resources on the machine to the point that the system can't open up any new processes even if you manually killed the other processes? It seems like some kind of memory leak or something since it's almost like Win9x running out of GUI resources.

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It's probably not a misbehaving program since I have tried not running anything and it does the same thing... it has something to do with long idle time and then windows decides to parse or something.

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Originally posted by Almighty1  

It seems that the WinXP Pro machines that I and several of my friends have work fine on bootup and even if they don't touch, after approximately a day or so, the HDD is heavily accessed and then the system is slow as molasses accessing the VM and it will continue to access the VM until all the resources on the system is used up and the only thing is to either shutdown or reboot.  Anyone know what's causing this?  Since all the systems have between 512megs to 1gig of ram.

One word: VIRUS

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Nope, not that either.... I thought it was a virus but it isn't... it has something to do with the parsing feature. I've scanned the system with both Norton, Kaspersky and McAfee...

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There is a program that runs in the background called PC Health, it was included with ME and now XP. It really makes your harddrive go busy when you leave your computer idle and when you go back on your computer it takes a few minutes to go back to normal. In ME there is a way to uninstall it with the run command, but I am not sure about XP, I have not tried it yet.

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There is also an indexing service that is turned on by default. This will scour your hard drive and index it in a way so that when you do searches, it will be faster. This may be another reason why your hd is reading when you're not doing anything to the computer.

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Hm, the indexing service might be it but does that like busies the hd and makes things slow and even makes the Windows logon go back to the Win2k style because it's out of resources?

Just a update.... I've checked and the indexing service is on manual and isn't even started.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Alien Venom,

Do you happen to remember what you did? Also, is WinXP Pro supposed to have a PC Health scheduled task that runs every 6 hours?

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