Constant HDD Thrashing in Vista is Affecting Performance

[Brandon Live Veteran]

With respect, it's difficult to narrow the disk activity down generally like that. The original poster stated that the disk was thrashing while not actually doing anything in Vista. That's probably not a compatibility issue, but more a process issue. I look at my HDD (while I'm touching nothing) and after 10 minutes of churning, think to myself, "ok, something is doing something." It's just a matter of finding out what.

That's what started investigations into what is being read/written to disk, and my VSS service usage as listed above. For users like me who are comparatively new to Vista, and having large HDDs and little if no warning about the disk usage resulting of a simple program install/uninstall, it would appear to all neophytes converted to Vista that it just chews at the HDD. Fair enough, right?

I'm just saying that I've got fully 100% supported hardware and software, and can completely replicate a 20-minute "thrashing" of my HDD just by installing a program. Easily reproduced, and I've demonstrated how anyone here can do it. Not that it's a bad thing, I'm just explaining how it's happening from one point of view.

In my earlier response I pointed out that disk activity during idle time is normal for the first couple days (sometimes more, or less, depending on if you turn your computer off, power settings, etc), as Vista is performing its "moving in" tasks. Once that's completed, you'll normally only have disk activity during idle time during scheduled defrags, anti-virus scans, etc. Of course, if you move thousands of files in or out of indexed locations, it may take a short time for the indexer to catch up. But that shouldn't affect performance of your system at all.

What I was referring to was actual disk "thrashing" that negatively impacts performance of the system. There are lots of possible causes of that, but disabling system services isn't the right solution to any of them.

[OPaul]

If running out of RAM is the cause of the hard drive "thrashing" (which I've seen on numerious machines), and consequently Vista starts using more and more page file space, then disabling services would help reduce the amount of system memory required.

[Googintosh]

I installed a recent newer revision of my chipset driver and enabled SuperFetch again. It seems to be acting properly now. No more constant chaotic hard drive thrashing that impacted performance. Though, during the time I had SuperFetch disabled I may have updated NOD32 to a newer revision, and updated my X-Fi drivers several times as well, so I'm not sure what exactly was causing SuperFetch to go haywire.

[Lt.Longrifle]

On 512MB of RAM, Vista Ultimate Aero Theme, with a few of the tweaks I've made *Tweaks in the system that anybody can do following the guides online*, I've managed to speed up vista...

I have KIS 7.0 running in the background, doing 4 scans right now, the only problem is, explorer, scanning stuff, etc...with normal programs and such is insanely slow and I have to leave the computer and let it do its thing or else it'll freeeze....and the Disk Cleanup problem I have.....which eats away my GB's, with no help from anyone it looks like a system restore for the 15th time is the only solution....

Vista wasn't meant for 512MB, but, with these changes I've made, I could only imagine if I had 1GB of RAM, how much faster everything would be...

if anyone wants, I'd be glad posting a complete guide to what I've done, if I can make this 512MB Vista Ultimate Aero machine fast, then if you have a GB of RAM there's hope for you, you just have to knwo what to do...

My internet pages load in a matter of seconds, but it took many months of system restores and studying Vista, testing out everything people say to see what works and what doesn't....

The thing is, no matter how much cpu and such experience you have it doesn't mean you know anything about what's needed to understand the OS good enough....

I know absolutely nothing about computers except RAM, but I know allot about the Vista OS....

My Vista computer makes absolutely no noise at all, even as I'm typing this, with four scanners in the background, and scanners that are always running on my comp anytime it's turned on, I have no problems at all.....

I just came erlier from playing CS on steam, no slow down at all, no freeezing up or anything...

I always here how 1GB is the minimum, but that's suggested only for experience Vista OS users...if not, I'd say about one GB more..

[Zip]

i found that my hdd thrashing was due to vista attempting to defrag my 3 disks and never finishing it so it was always trying. i did a manual defrag and left it for about a day. now its much better.

also, the indexing service is useless... its for the xp/2000 style indexed search. you can disable it and still have the vista style instant search (thats the searchindexer service)

[neufuse Veteran]

Don't disable Search, Defender, or SuperFetch. SuperFetch won't cause thrashing of your disk to any significant degree.

If you just upgraded to or installed Vista very recently, give it a couple of days to settle down. During the first day or two (or more if your computer sleeps or is off when idle) Vista has a lot of "moving in" tasks it performs to optimize your system. Indexing is one of them, but there are many others like optimizing your disk, boot-up, and more. Of course, all that stuff should only happen when the computer is idle. If it's actually impacting your usage of the system, you probably have an incompatible application or driver.

Disabling Windows services isn't a very good solution, since it won't identify the real culprit. Vista certainly wasn't designed to have constant disk thrashing happening, so there's probably some external factor causing or contributing to your problem.

I've been using Vista Ultimate since RTM and to this day! it still runs the HDD like CRAZY! and the only apps we have on this system is AOL IM and Photoshop... and when I checked what was doing it in process explorer it went right back to the new search indexer... disable that and all is fine... but re-enable it and run like crazy again... even though there really isnt anything to index on the system... I dont store data files on it... just the system and program files

[majorbaka]

Had the same problem and tried disabling indexing etc and all services not required but still constant thrashing.

Try checking your hard drive. I found about 4kb of bad sectors. Imaged the data to a slower drive and problem solved

Vista now silent.

Hope this helps.

[ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm]

disabling readyboost does not slow boot times, i timed my boot time from the point the boot screen appears to the point it vanishes.

readyboost on 25secs

readyboost off 25secs

[zshadow]

Superfetch is terrible IMO. Maybe it doesn't work right on my system due to bad drivers (even though I have all the latest installed), who knows. But when it's enabled my HDD starts thrashing like crazy.

When I disable it, programs still load fast, and I experience no thrashing. This is not on a new Vista installation either (it's about one month old).

AMD X2 5000+

2GB RAM

8600 GT

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Superfetch is terrible IMO. Maybe it doesn't work right on my system due to bad drivers (even though I have all the latest installed), who knows. But when it's enabled my HDD starts thrashing like crazy.

When I disable it, programs still load fast, and I experience no thrashing. This is not on a new Vista installation either (it's about one month old).

AMD X2 5000+

2GB RAM

8600 GT

SuperFetch makes programs start faster on cold boot. But more importantly, it swaps pages back into memory after they've been paged to disk (when memory becomes available again).

[abecedarian paradoxious]

With respect, it's difficult to narrow the disk activity down generally like that.

>snip<

I'm just saying that I've got fully 100% supported hardware and software, and can completely replicate a 20-minute "thrashing" of my HDD just by installing a program. Easily reproduced, and I've demonstrated how anyone here can do it. Not that it's a bad thing, I'm just explaining how it's happening from one point of view.

Wow... you've got 100% supported hardware and software and can replicate 'thrashing' by installing "a program"....

sounds like that "program" may be the culprit... if you subscribe to the 'LOGICAL' train of thought.

I find it odd that people believe that the operating system is at fault when things go wrong when they install a program.

No one seems to think that it could be that 'program' causing the problem.

[Boeing 787]

I disable most of the lousy apps and Vista runs almost like XP.

1. Disable Search Indexer (Good idea that Microsoft ruined)

2. Disable Volume Shadow copy (System Restore) = (Acronis True Image is better)

3. Hibernation (I never Hibernate my desktop)

4. Disable Sleep Mode (Suspend to RAM + 24/7 operation + UPS)

5. Turn off Remote Differential Compression

6. Turn off Automatic Windows Defender

7. Turn off Automatic Disk Defragmentation

8. Disable User Access Control or use TweakUAC

9. Disable Microsoft Transient Multi-Monitor Manager (Annoying delay at boot)

Edited December 8, 2007 by hardgiant

[ViperAFK]

I disable most of the lousy apps and Vista runs almost like XP.

1. Disable Search Indexer (Good idea that Microsoft ruined)

2. Disable Volume Shadow copy (System Restore) = (Acronis True Image is better)

3. Hibernation (I never Hibernate my desktop)

4. Disable Sleep Mode (Suspend to RAM + 24/7 operation + UPS)

5. Turn off Remote Differential Compression

6. Turn off Automatic Windows Defender

7. Turn off Automatic Disk Defragmentation

8. Disable User Access Control or use TweakUAC

9. Disable Microsoft Transient Multi-Monitor Manager (Annoying delay at boot)

Why not use XP then, you've disabledf half of vista's new features :) The only one i turn off is the disk defrag which sucks because it takes so damn long, I use auslogics and can defrag my whole 250 gb drive in a couple minutes, whereas vista's defrag will take THREE HOURS. I love the instant search and is the main thing I miss in XP, superfetch actualy has a very noticable difference to me, some apps in vista are launching way faster than in XP.

I find the multi monitor thing is something I might want to disable though because I will probably never use to monitors, how do you disable it?

[Thrawn]

This is a really long thread and you're not going to read this... but do you know what I think really speeds vista up? Leaving your computar on continuously. I think it give all the services the time to do what they want, so they don't have to run when the computer is not idle.

I don't disable any major features on the laptop, and it's only got 1GB ram. But, it runs faster then XP thanks to teh vista technology. I'm guessing, with your complaints, that you turn your computar off.

[freak_power]

vista works with alot less than 4 GB,where you got that from is beyond me.

Brandon Live:you are correct,superfetch is a good thing to have enabled,to all those that think superfetch is bad you need to try vista and test it.

To be more precise. I would not run Vista itself with 1Gb of RAM. 2GB of RAM is ok to run Vista itself and simple apps, but then if you have opened 3 instances of Visual Studio 2005/2008 along with Word and IE or you want to play Crysis with high/very high details then 2GB wont cut it.

So I say 4GB + Raid 0 HDD is a way to go with Vista.

[hotdog666al]

To be more precise. I would not run Vista itself with 1Gb of RAM. 2GB of RAM is ok to run Vista itself and simple apps, but then if you have opened 3 instances of Visual Studio 2005/2008 along with Word and IE or you want to play Crysis with high/very high details then 2GB wont cut it.

So I say 4GB + Raid 0 HDD is a way to go with Vista.

Your name is "freak_power" for a reason I guess, haha.

[ViperAFK]

Vista games fine with 2 GB RAM.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

To be more precise. I would not run Vista itself with 1Gb of RAM. 2GB of RAM is ok to run Vista itself and simple apps, but then if you have opened 3 instances of Visual Studio 2005/2008 along with Word and IE or you want to play Crysis with high/very high details then 2GB wont cut it.

So I say 4GB + Raid 0 HDD is a way to go with Vista.

Not everyone can afford 4GB and RAID 0. 2GB works perfectly fine for those tasks, which is how my laptop runs. 1GB works fine too.

512MB works fine for normal app usage and Basic / Classic mode.

[null_]

I've been running Windows Vista on 2 GB of RAM just fine, I use Photoshop CS3 intensively with very large photographs along with multiple Internet Explorer windows, Windows Live Messenger 8.5, Microsoft Word, EditPlus 2, Dreamweaver CS3, etc and Windows has never slowed down on me, I rarely restart my notebook either, usually just hibernate or sleep. I haven't had hard drive thrashing either, and the indexer works just fine.

[rschlack]

I have this same problem and I'm still in the process of getting rid of it. I ran SpinRight on my drive, so I know my drive is 100% ok.

I have Norton 2009 which did remove some viruses a few weeks ago. My belief is that I have some left over from these malware/viruses. Anyway, I figured out through trial and error after trying everything listed in this thread that if I created a new admin profile and logged into that profile the thrashing went away.

So I ran msconfig in the profile that is having the hdd thrashing and shut off all the startup items that I didn't want or didn't know about. After a reboot I realized, by running msconfig again and looking at the startup tab, that there were two rundll32.exe programs running at startup. They were starting dll's in my profile's appdata/local/temp directory. khFWpOHb.dll and opNhFuTm.dll. So I changed these to not start up, logged into my other admin profile and deleted these 2 files from temp. After logging back into my regular profile the noise was gone for about a minute or two. Then the files came back again and the hdd thrashing started up as soon as the files showed up.

I am now in the process of running malwarebytes, which I downloaded from malwarebytes.org. It's definitely found some stuff. I'll let you know what happens when it's done.

If the hdd thrashing doesn't go away after that I will log into my other profile again, delete those files and create empty text files with the same names. I will then make them read only and see if that works.

If that doesn't work I will call it quits and just migrate some of my pictures and stuff to the new profile and delete the bad profile.

Wish me luck. I'll write back later to tell you what happened.

[.Kompressor]

I could've sworn that this was a problem in the initial release of Vista...and Microsoft fixed it.

do you have SP1 installed?