Argh, Windows 7 is annoying the hell out of me!


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So on my first HD that I got with my PC, everything was running decently. You can see my specs below that while my rig is not a monster, it's pretty good for gaming and graphics/multimedia ETC.

But I feel Windows is crippling the true power of my PC! First off, I updated the ram to 4gb DDR3, it seemed a little better, then the next problem was that the HD was too slow? Slow? Come on, it's freaking SATA2 with 16mb cache, I have had faster IDE HD's back in the pentium 4/athlon days. As for that, my neighbor who's computer I fix from time to time has an old HP Pavilion with a pentium 4 and 128mb sdram and it starts up faster than my Windows 7 rig wakes from hibernate (which doesn't even work anymore, I can only do sleep mode.)

Also, no matter what hard drive I use, the "windows experience" thing always gives it a low rating, not that I care what is the rating, but that means that there's obviously a problem with how Windows reads hard drives or something, because on top of that, my HD light activity is rampant during the first few minutes of starting up, and it is just aggravating that a pentium 4 starts up faster than mines.

And why does Windows change my settings without even warning/telling me? I put /NOGUI for startup and all of a sudden, it is magically unchecked. Why?

Anyway, so can anyone tell me any tips and tricks to get it running like a PC should, because why did I just pay $1000 for a PC that can't even start at a speed without disappointing me!? Well I am sure it's not my parts, it is just Windows. How to make it damn efficient? I am tired of modding files and going to msconfig and services. What if my wife uses it, would she know how to edit the prefetch files and how to use regedit? No, and I shouldn't know how to either, because my operating system should just work right.

I should forward this letter to Microsoft, because I am so sick and tired of ranting about this situation. Every install of Windows 7 gave me either the same problem, or a new problem combines with the old ones, even on other hardware.

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Put an SSD in your pc if your worried about start-up time and your Windows rating...

My computer starts up in a good amount of time from hibernate so I can not relate.

As for the /NOGUI option disappearing I have not heard of this issue.

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windows experience always uses the lowest score on your computer if everything else is say 7.0 and your hard drive is a 7200 rpm drive you will always get 5.9 because of the hard drive because its not an ssd.

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have you made sure all your drivers are up to date? Have no dodgy software installed? As to be honest 99.999% of people have no issue with windows 7, so its unlikely that its a problem with the OS, but more likely a software issue, virus problem, could even be your virus scanner, or it could be a hardware problem. You mention your hdd seems to be slow? could try running a benchmarking tool such as hdtune to see what the actual speeds are

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I am tired of modding files and going to msconfig and services. What if my wife uses it, would she know how to edit the prefetch files and how to use regedit? No, and I shouldn't know how to either, because my operating system should just work right.

Perhaps if you stopped ****ing with settings like that then things would work right. People who treat Windows 7 as if it were Windows 98 or XP are the ones who always have the problems, it seems. Install the OS, install the software you need, and leave it the **** alone!!!

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Do you have AHCI enabled? Without it I don't think NCQ is enabled for SATA drives, but I could be wrong.

The above is correct, but the question you should ask the OP are his drives Native Command Queuing [NCQ] Drives? If not then it's a mute point!

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It's an eco green drive, from what I can gather most of those spin at 5400 RPM, and are slower than ordinary drives, in fact

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/internal-hard-drives/1279444/western-digital-caviar-green-1tb

This review right here says

It might save you a bit of power, but its inconsistent performance makes it a hard disk that's worth avoiding.

Looks as if the drive is particularly bad at small reads and writes, something that happens a lot at Windows bootup, so it's no surprising you have poor startup performance. As for the disk thrashing at startup, that's superfetch doing it's thing. It runs in low priority IO mode, and is nothing to be concerned about.

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Yeah its definitely the 5400rpm hard drive lol. You could consider getting a smaller faster drive to use as a boot drive and use the 1tb drive for storage. If you really want super fast boot speed and app launch speed look into getting an SSD for the boot drive :)

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I would ignore the Windows Experience benchmarks straight away - look into a proper benchmarking program to see if your hard drives are performing well.

Green drives are slower than the blues/blacks. If you have a green, put up with it or change it out for a decent black or an SSD if price isn't an option.

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Perhaps if you stopped ****ing with settings like that then things would work right. People who treat Windows 7 as if it were Windows 98 or XP are the ones who always have the problems, it seems. Install the OS, install the software you need, and leave it the **** alone!!!

Amen!!

I'd have to guess system is full of bugs and such though.

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I would ignore the Windows Experience benchmarks straight away - look into a proper benchmarking program to see if your hard drives are performing well.

Green drives are slower than the blues/blacks. If you have a green, put up with it or change it out for a decent black or an SSD if price isn't an option.

HD Tune Pro. Great HDD benchmarking app :D

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Have you tried upgrading the motherboard drivers and stuff? Seriously, I build a $300 PC, with a $20 CPU, that ran better then yours does. that's a hardware/driver/low level software problem, not common at all.

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I'm just going to re-iterate what everyone else is saying and agree that using a 5400rpm drive to boot from is not good and you will not get good performance. There okay just to use as storage, but be disappointed for anything else.

Also, stop screwing around with the prefetch / superfetch / services and leave the damn thing alone. For the first few days of use there will be a lot of disk thrashing because indexes are being created and files are being moved around to allow faster loading of your apps.

Either RAID some hard drives together, or buy an SSD.

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A Caviar Green HDD should not be used as a boot drive. It's a cheap eco drive that gives you lot's of storage for a cheap price. Upgrade to a better 7200rpm drive or an SSD and use your green drive as storage only.

Also, like others have said. Stop screwing with your settings.

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Perhaps if you stopped ****ing with settings like that then things would work right. People who treat Windows 7 as if it were Windows 98 or XP are the ones who always have the problems, it seems. Install the OS, install the software you need, and leave it the **** alone!!!

Amen, that paragraph alone should be a stickie lol. I see people all the time "optimizing" their services for example.. Windows 7 doesn't need it.. if it's idle, it gets offloaded and doesn't use physical memory. Things are a lot more intertwined than they appear too. Disabling one thing can break something seemly unrelated, networking being a good example. Obvious third party "why the hell is it even there" updater services aside, wouldn't even touch them. Same goes for Readyboost, had a neighbor disable his to 'save memory', then couldn't figure out why his system was suddenly booting slowly, etc etc. First few ideas out of his mouth was virus, "7 sucks going back to XP", or needs a reformat because of a Microsoft bug.

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Perhaps if you stopped ****ing with settings like that then things would work right. People who treat Windows 7 as if it were Windows 98 or XP are the ones who always have the problems, it seems. Install the OS, install the software you need, and leave it the **** alone!!!

Amen. You said it brother!

Amen, that paragraph alone should be a stickie lol. I see people all the time "optimizing" their services for example.. Windows 7 doesn't need it.. if it's idle, it gets offloaded and doesn't use physical memory. Things are a lot more intertwined than they appear too. Disabling one thing can break something seemly unrelated, networking being a good example. Obvious third party "why the hell is it even there" updater services aside, wouldn't even touch them. Same goes for Readyboost, had a neighbor disable his to 'save memory', then couldn't figure out why his system was suddenly booting slowly, etc etc. First few ideas out of his mouth was virus, "7 sucks going back to XP", or needs a reformat because of a Microsoft bug.

I just saw your post - not from Toronto by chance? ;)

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Sleep is not what they call "Hybrid Sleep" which is sleep mode and hybernate combined. It's really a great way of doing it.

Unless you use an SSD, your normal hard drive will be rated 5.9 or below. They adjusted the windows experience rating to compensate for faster hardware, you know, like they did with Vista as well. Hhy would they have the index rate the hardware against speeds from 10 years ago?

As for startup speeds, Windows uploads itself to ram on startup, so ya it can take a bit longer to start up on some systems, but the experience afterwards is much faster. Not only that but your hard drive is slow. Those green drives are a BIT more power efficient, but you pay a heavy cost in speed.

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