Installing games/applications slow - Vista

Soldato
Joined
4 Mar 2003
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12,449
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Chatteris
OK, I've come across a new problem that I've not seen before.
A quick Google doesn't really throw anything up.

The problem I'm seeing is that games and applications are simply taking an eternity to install on a machine I've just built.
The specification is:

ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-Ap@n Motherboard
Core2Quad Q6700 2.66GHz @ 3GHz
4GB (4x 1GB) Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1600
NVidia 8800GTX
2x Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB HD
Pioneer BDC-202BK BD-ROM/DVD-RW
Vista Ultimate 64

Installation of the OS went fine and Windows feels nice and nippy.
All general benchmarks check out OK and the machine feels like it is operating as it should do with one exception - games and applications take absolutely ages to install.
Examples being Hellgate London & C&C 3 both took over half an hour to install.
Office 2007 and Expression Web both took well over 15 minutes to install.
While the installations are running I can't do anything else with the machine - I can attempt to launch say Outlook or IE and it will take ages before they eventually open.

As soon as the installation starts the HD light will come on and stay on, however the DVD-ROM just seems to now and again read.
Has anybody seen anything like this before?

Until this motherboard my last 3 have all been Gigabyte boards.
Is there something in the BIOS that I should be setting with regards the ASUS board?
It almost feels like maybe there is no DMA access going on - the speed of the install reminds me of say installing something under DOS6/Win3.1 without Smartdrive loaded, just taking for ages.
 
Associate
Joined
14 Mar 2005
Posts
2,202
Try turning off Windows Defender and trying again. It's real time scanning is notorius for slowdowns on disk intensive process' like installing a program.

Also have you applied all the updates to windows as there were some disk transfer issues that were fixed.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2004
Posts
20,598
Location
England
check task manager and see if anything is hogging the cpu? i was recently playing a game on vista and it ground to halt, so i alt-tabbed out to check what was going on and there was something called trustedinstaller.exe (it's a legit windows service something to do with windows update) and that was hogging the cpu badly. to say i was not happy was an understatement. why the **** did it decide to kick in when the pc is being used. :mad: :p

(it hasn't happened since. hopefully it was a one off.)
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
4 Mar 2003
Posts
12,449
Location
Chatteris
The machine is definitely fully patched.
That is - all updates available from Windows Update plus some of the other ones that don't apear to have made their way there yet.
So that includes the ones listed on NVidia's website for example.
All Hotfixes installed as well.

With regards drivers, again everything is up to date with the latest releases from Intel, NVidia, Creative Labs etc.
My AV of choice is NOD32 and I'm running the latest 64bit version of the product (I bought a 3 pack/3 years of updates last year) and this hasn't caused problems in the past.

When I'm experiencing the problem I've bought up task manager.
That too takes an eternity to appear whilst an installation process is running.
However once it does appear I'm seeing Idle process at around 90%.
I've not experienced any issues with Windows Defender in the past, even with NOD32 running at the same time.
However I shall switch Windows Defender and System Restore off this evening and give things another go.
Windows Defender I'm not fussed about, I would however like to keep System Restore running if possible - it has been the savior of bacon in the past.
 
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