Windows Vista 24/7 Hard Drive Activity.

[zeroomegazx]

I think this is what you mean? If it's not, just let me know if you need more screenshots.

As far as Process Explorer, I downloaded it and there's only two rundll32.dll listed and both of them say they are related to my nvidia driver when I hover over it as seen below.

Hey Fultz

As someone who has been benchmarking XP vs Vista gaming I can tell you a few things that might help. Things I will say off the bat are the following:

Disable Readyboost or simply just don't use it.

Disable indexing, unless you search your HD a ton it isn't worth the performance loss when the drive index's itself

Disable Automatic Defragmentation, this is super annoying, nuff said.

Other than that I can give you some words of advice from what I have seen in my trials. Vista honestly doesn't know what to do with itself half of the time. I have experienced the same problem on my test machines at home that you have, hard drive usage wise. Sometimes vista will just go nuts on the hard drive for no forseeable reason. However the lag you are experiencing in your game seems very unrelated to the small hard drive usage. What you may be experiencing is network trouble, node trouble, or possibly your model of video card (bargin bin version of the 6xxx Series). WoW shouldn't run that bad with those hardware specs that you have though unless you are in a highly populated area with other players or enemies/NPCs. I'd suggest reformatting and placing only the newest drives, windows updates, and wow on your computer and compare to see if its running better, then slowly add more software back on to figure out whats causing the issue.

[notuptome2004]

ther is no performance loss when running windows indexing i have not seen none and when windows indexes itself it is running in a low priority mode in the background so.

[dimlag]

@fultz2005 My friend it looks like your pc is clean at least for the problem I have mentioned.

[Linkinfamous]

:pinch:

Disable Readyboost or simply just don't use it.

The Readyboost service also controls Readyboot, which helps boot performance. Don't disable the service.

Disable indexing, unless you search your HD a ton it isn't worth the performance loss when the drive index's itself

Beyond the initial period immediately after install, this should not be the case.

Disable Automatic Defragmentation, this is super annoying, nuff said.

How on earth is this annoying? It defrags once a week at like 3AM.

[ViperAFK]

Yeah and you can just change the defrag time to whenever you aren't going to be at your PC. The thing I hated about it is it would take like all day to defrag even when I wasn't at my PC, but this seems to be fixed in the SPI RC for me and now it takes like 20 minutes to defrag even while I'm using is as opposed to hours on end. My processor is the lowest score at 5.3 so it ends up at 5.3.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

I think this is what you mean? If it's not, just let me know if you need more screenshots.

From the Performance Monitor shot it looks like normal disk activity, and very small amounts. But you only show the write activity, not what it looks like when sorted by read activity. And was this taken during a period of the activity that is bothering you?

[fultz2005]

Oh... I didn't know it's supposed to constantly write to the hard drive all the time. If this is normal then I guess the lag must be unrelated to the hard drive activity. Maybe it's a problem with blizzard's new patch? It pretty much only lags in world of warcraft or maplestory, but maplestory is a ram hog anyways so that's not out of the norm. I didn't include screenshots of the read activity because most of the time, there's not much read activity going on unless it's from something I've done.

As far as readyboost goes, after disabling it my computer boots up 10-20 seconds faster. Not sure why that is but it's true.

Anyway, thanks a lot for all of your insightful posts and sorry for wasting your time.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Oh... I didn't know it's supposed to constantly write to the hard drive all the time. If this is normal then I guess the lag must be unrelated to the hard drive activity. Maybe it's a problem with blizzard's new patch? It pretty much only lags in world of warcraft or maplestory, but maplestory is a ram hog anyways so that's not out of the norm. I didn't include screenshots of the read activity because most of the time, there's not much read activity going on unless it's from something I've done.

As far as readyboost goes, after disabling it my computer boots up 10-20 seconds faster. Not sure why that is but it's true.

Anyway, thanks a lot for all of your insightful posts and sorry for wasting your time.

Well, not all the time, but pretty frequently. The files shown in your screenshot seem to be mainly registry files and the NTFS log. In fact, they may have even been written to in response to you opening the resource monitor. Most of the time those files are only hitting the cache anyway. And less than a MB per minute (and that's probably a spike) isn't going to impact anything really...

If your only problem is lag in WOW, that could be caused by any number of things. If the lag is accompanied by audible thrashing from your disk, it could well be WOW loading texture data, downloading landblock data, etc. It could also be something else, some application or service that is disrupting you play. But at this point I don't see any way of knowing what that could be.

[fultz2005]

Well, not all the time, but pretty frequently. The files shown in your screenshot seem to be mainly registry files and the NTFS log. In fact, they may have even been written to in response to you opening the resource monitor. Most of the time those files are only hitting the cache anyway. And less than a MB per minute (and that's probably a spike) isn't going to impact anything really...

If your only problem is lag in WOW, that could be caused by any number of things. If the lag is accompanied by audible thrashing from your disk, it could well be WOW loading texture data, downloading landblock data, etc. It could also be something else, some application or service that is disrupting you play. But at this point I don't see any way of knowing what that could be.

Well I don't think the files were written in response to me opening the resource monitor because even when I let my computer idle the hard drive light flashes all the time, but yeah, I pretty much only lag in WOW so it probably is something with the new patch, they recently went through a new patch so maybe that's the problem. Other players in my guild claim not to have the problem, though. That's why I thought maybe it was related to the constant hard drive activity. It probably has done it since the beginning and I just didn't notice it until I started having problems.

[soldier1st]

that 6150 is an integrated card and 1 GB is not enough for vista,it will barely do the job,go to 2GB and upgrade your gfx card to a dedicated one and use the official nvidia lastest vista drivers,brandon live knows plenty about vista,the indexing should not be causing the problem,i believe it is your hardware,also vista needs to time to move in and for the first few days it will do that.