Strange Lag when extracting/installing something

[M.F.D.K]

Right lads this might be a normal thing but I thought, well bugger me I will just see if anyone has the same problem (if I may call it a problem)

When I use Winrar or 7zip to extract something there is a lag in the whole system (including installing a game or program), things open up with a certain delay. Now when I look up at TaskManager, there is hardly any CPU usage. Its not so much of a problem but like I said it sort of pester me.

Win7 Ult 64bit

Q6600

4GB of Ram

ATI 3850HD 512MB

Should that be a normal thing..!

[+allan MVC]

Give it a few days for the system (and superfetch) to settle in and see if it's still an issue.

[M.F.D.K]

  allan said:

Give it a few days for the system (and superfetch) to settle in and see if it's still an issue.

I have got my Windows 7 copy early than the public release through my subscription, so no I hardly believe it is the superfetch.

[neufuse Veteran]

do you have an anti-virust/spyware/ or still have windows defender installed and running? those tend to to realtime scanning which can cause these pauses and lags

[+allan MVC]

  M.F.D.K said:

I have got my Windows 7 copy early than the public release through my subscription, so no I hardly believe it is the superfetch.

Yeah, I did too, though I only just got around to installing it the other day. I've already started to notice a diffence in "snappiness" with each passing day - though I guess that's not the issue with your system. Sorry - just a thought.

And re: neufuse's post - Although I had Defender (and the Defender service) disabled with Vista, when I upgraded to 7 (yeah, I did an upgrade - had to for a number of reasons) I found that Defender & the service were reenabled & I had to set the service back to "disabled"

[Draconian Guppy]

  allan said:

. I've already started to notice a diffence in "snappiness" with each passing day -

Yeah me too. I thought I was going mad... :s

[+allan MVC]

  Draconian Guppy said:

Yeah me too. I thought I was going mad... :s

Not to say you aren't, you know :D

As was the case with Vista, Windows 7 superfetch will take a few days to "learn your system & habits" and "settle down". As it does, everything from boot time to app loading should get a little quicker.

[M.F.D.K]

Windows 7 has been very smooth and snappy after a couple of days or so, so i understand you've got to give it a bit of time to settle down. Its been great and everything works great, as i mentioned it before, its not so much of problem, but would be great to find out why

its lagging, might be due to overclocking, although i hardly believe thats the case since i never experienced a heating or throttling problem, games work great and apps open up almost instantly.

  neufuse said:

do you have an anti-virust/spyware/ or still have windows defender installed and running? those tend to to realtime scanning which can cause these pauses and lags

I use MSE combined with windows firewall.

[neufuse Veteran]

  M.F.D.K said:

Windows 7 has been very smooth and snappy after a couple of days or so, so i understand you've got to give it a bit of time to settle down. Its been great and everything works great, as i mentioned it before, its not so much of problem, but would be great to find out why

its lagging, might be due to overclocking, although i hardly believe thats the case since i never experienced a heating or throttling problem, games work great and apps open up almost instantly.

I've had MSE slow down like crazy when downloading large files after its done, when the real time scanning kicks in, I see large pauses while it scans it... also get this during large file copy operations too.. turn it off an snappy as heck, I get the same result with ESET NOD32 and its a good power system im doing this on (i7 920 system with 6GB DDR3 RAM)

[solxe]

I still need an answer to this problem, it's really hard to find a solution.

I also get freezes/lag when extracting something big / installing an app or game / when transferring things between harddrives.

The transfer rate between the harddrives is a bout 40-50mb/s.

My specs:

Gigabyte P35

Q6600

2GB ram

8800gts

Win 7 64bit ultimate

I run Microsoft Security Essentials for AV, ran NOD32 before but that didn't help.

Windows Defender is turned off.

Pagefile is not on my windows drive, haven't noticed any difference.

Any tips or reason why things lock up and lag?

All drivers are updated and should be installed correctly.

[PurePhoenix]

You're right. That IS odd.

How old is the HDD with Windows 7 on it?

Are we talking about IDE hard drives here that have a 20mb/sec maximum transfer rate?

Or are we talking about PATA 60mb/sec or SATA 2 110mb/sec drives?

Having your pagefile on a seperate hard drive is a great start, some AV's are known to slow down machines quite severely tho.

[solxe]

They are both sata drives, the motherboards sata controller is in RAID mode right now due to I had a raid before but not anymore, do you think if I switch to AHCI mode it might get fixed? I did not have any issues before in XP though when I had it in raid mode. I have the latest intel driver for the sata controller (ICH9)

[Nagisan]

How full (or empty) is your ram during this time? In the past I have had WinRAR use up nearly all my ram as it was extracting large files, to the point my system lagged horribly until it was done and my ram was freed once again from the evil clutches of WinRAR.

I personally do not have this problem with 7zip though.

[solxe]

I took a peek at the taskmanager while transferring stuff from one drive to the other and noticed that where it says "Physical Memory", there is:

Total

Cached

Available

Free

I don't know what the difference between available and free is but when I'm idle, free is at about 250-300mb, but when I transfer or extract stuff it goes down to 0 (zero). Could it just be that I need more ram? or can I configure it so that it doesn't cache as much ram to other useless stuff?

I'm thankful for any suggestions.

[Nagisan]

The important value is Available I think.....Free is how much ram you have free after superfetch has preloaded stuff, Available is how much ram you have if Superfetch was to unload everything it was holding (which it does if you do need that ram). If that number drops very low (200-300MB) you will often have crappy system performance until whatever action you are doing is finished.

[PurePhoenix]

Well, i have no real issue with extracting in WinRar. I set my temporary extraction path in Winrar to the same drive that i store things on as well though.

Default behaviour of winrar is extracting to RAM, then dump to C: temp folder, then copy/move to D: storage/extraction location.

This takes two long copy operations as the file is written to C: temporarily, then moved to the hard drive you actually want it extracted to.

With the temporary extraction folder set to the same drive you're storing the extracted content on, it's one long copy operation.

Winrar extracts teh file into ram and then into say, D:\rartemp and then moves it to the appropriate location on the same hard drive -

which as you should know already, move operations on the same hard drive under windows/NTFS are almost instant.

Just the path reference is re-written so it appears to be at d:\blah\extracted-path and the actual data remains in the same spot.

You can change the temporary extraction path for all winrar actions by going to options > settings > paths and unticking "Use only for removable disks".

This shouldn't affect any installers/uninstaller actions though. It might be worthwhile if you just double checked you have actually disabled the pagefile on c: and haven't simply created a 2nd pagefile on another hard drive.