---> Stopping the Hard Disk Thrashing in Vista

[The Asgard]

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.

 

[The Asgard]

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

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.

 

[The Asgard]

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...

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.

 

[The Asgard]

SuperFetch is a useful thing to have, seeing as it actually tends to increase application performance. Seems silly to turn it off.

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.

 

[The Asgard]

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.

 

[The Asgard]

well i can't argue with your experience.

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

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.