---> Stopping the Hard Disk Thrashing in Vista

The Asgard

The Asgard

The Asgard

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Here's how you restore your performance and stop the dreaded thrashing.

1. Turn Off System Restore
Go to Control Panel/System/Advanced System Settings. Select System protection and untick the available drive. You might have to wait a bit because it will probably say searching.

2. Disable "Windows Search" Service
Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/services from the control panel. Right click properties, press stop and set startup type to disabled.

3. Disable "SuperFetch"
Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/services from the control panel
Right click properties, press stop and set startup type to disabled.

4. Turn off drive indexing.
Right click on the drive from my computer and uncheck "Index this drive for faster searching"


Hope this helps.
 
So thats why my drive is always looks like its doing something. Will i miss any of those things if i turn them off? As i dont know what they do appart from system restore.

Hopefully turning a few of these off will extend the life of the laptop battery a bit :)
 
how random said:
So thats why my drive is always looks like its doing something. Will i miss any of those things if i turn them off? As i dont know what they do appart from system restore.

Hopefully turning a few of these off will extend the life of the laptop battery a bit :)
Click to expand...

If you Turn Off System Restore the system wont automatically create restore points. On XP I would manually create a restore points if required, Installation of iffy software etc......

You wont miss the rest.

Your Laptop battery will love you after these useful tweaks.
 
My install of Vista on my laptop thrashed away for the first day or 2 of use as it has to build the initial index.

Now, I hardly ever notice it all. If I install a program, it'll update the index and the hard drive will thrash but only for a few seconds.

Got any links to show the improvement it has on battery life? If you left the power plan on High performance then it'll have a big improvement as Search and Indexing will run as normal. If you switch to the Power Saver, it'll force the Search and Indexing service to not run as frequently, thus reducing hard drive use and extending battery life.
 
Ive just got system restore off and a 2gig readyboost drive & dont suffer from harddrive thrashing.
 
LeperousDust said:
Surely the superfetch and better indexing are what basically make vista, turning the off you might as well have a fancy themed XP? Rather expensive...
Click to expand...

LOL.

Some people dont have the option to run XP. I'm a developer and have to use Vista for compatabilty but develop under XP. It was useful to me and I'm sure it will be useful to other people.
 
Thanks :) The hard drive thrashing was for some reason giving me lag in games.

No idea why, but now I've done all this it's stopped \o/

Cheers :)
 
SuperFetch is a useful thing to have, seeing as it actually tends to increase application performance. Seems silly to turn it off.
 
TheVoice said:
SuperFetch is a useful thing to have, seeing as it actually tends to increase application performance. Seems silly to turn it off.
Click to expand...

indeed. it's one of the most useful new features. ok it might thrash your disk for a minute or 2 on each boot but that's it. i disable the rest of those services because they're useless. but superfetch is good.
 
TheVoice said:
SuperFetch is a useful thing to have, seeing as it actually tends to increase application performance. Seems silly to turn it off.
Click to expand...

Do you have any proof of it increasing performance?

At the end of the day try it. If your machine feels slower, re enable the feature.
 
Just playing with Superfetch and with it on the disk is thrashing continously, left it like that for 5 mins. Disable super fetch and the disk access stops.

My system feel more responsive with it off. Like I said have a play and come to your own conclusion and forget the hype. :)
 
marc2003 said:
well i can't argue with your experience.

anyway, my pc feels more responsive with superfetch on. and the disk doesn't thrash either??
Click to expand...

Interesting.

Using Vista Ultimate 32 Bit, fresh install yesterday with all the updates. Xeon Quad Running at 3.1Ghz, P5K Delux 900+ on the memory, 500GB WD RE2 and 4 Gig of ram.
 
Disabling automatic defrag and windows defender scan also helps prevent large hdd activity.

Personally I wouldn't disable superfetch, it is one of vista's best parts. Also I wouldn't disable indexing just tweak the options so that it only indexes the start menu and user files, as this is where search maybe useful.

I turned off system restore for my gaming rig but not my work laptop, situational.
 
The Asgard said:
Here's how you restore your performance and stop the dreaded thrashing.

1. Turn Off System Restore
Go to Control Panel/System/Advanced System Settings. Select System protection and untick the available drive. You might have to wait a bit because it will probably say searching.

2. Disable "Windows Search" Service
Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/services from the control panel. Right click properties, press stop and set startup type to disabled.

3. Disable "SuperFetch"
Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/services from the control panel
Right click properties, press stop and set startup type to disabled.

4. Turn off drive indexing.
Right click on the drive from my computer and uncheck "Index this drive for faster searching"


Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

installed vista 64 yesterday and it was trashing like hell

thought the hard drive was dying lol
restarted a few times but it was bad

doing the above has stopped all chugging

your a star mate :)

maybe i didnt need to disable them all but what the hell i dont use them
features anyway, i think ;)
 
Made my games a lot smoother, ive kept superfetch enabled, basically once vista has loaded it takes about 3mins of harddrive thrashing to sort itself out, after that it stops.

Windows search and indexing are the main problems, they keep trashing 24/7 which can be a nightmare when playing games.
 
you should leave superfetch on, gives a performance boost

system restore is good for newbies only
indexing & search are handy if you don't manage your files well

also, disable windows defender real-time scanning, it's like having an av program constantly scan your files as they're accessed
 
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