What is Vista doing on startup?

Felix E · 18 Nov 2006 at 13:12

I don't know if this is common to everyone, but when I boot into Vista, after the desktop has loaded the CPU usuage fluctuates from around 2%, up to 12% and sometimes higher to 18%, there is quite a lot of disk activity and under the 'Physical Memory' column in windows task manager, my 'Free' memory goes down and the 'Cached' memory goes up.

System has been on for 5 minutes now:

Total memory: 2045
Cached: 1679
Free: 53

At startup the cached would have been a lot lower and free much higher.. what exactly is going on with this?
After about 5 minutes it seems to be done, the cpu usage still fluctuates a bit but HD activity slows down or stops.

FishThrower · 18 Nov 2006 at 14:47

maybe its creating the pagefile? :confused:

what process is taking up 15%?

Felix E · 18 Nov 2006 at 14:51

No process can be seen to take up these jumps in cpu, it literally goes from 2% to 12% and back in a second... uptime now is 1h 44mins and it's showing between 0 and 4% usage, no hd activity at all. Whatever it's doing it just seems to do it on startup! Free memory now at 16mb with 1681 cached

Caged · 18 Nov 2006 at 15:00

It's not the search indexer or anything is it? I know Macs were slow for a couple of days after going from 10.3 > 10.4 while Spotlight indexed everything.

byron_hinson · 18 Nov 2006 at 15:02

it does some background tasks like defragments, cleanup, cache cleaning etc if you leave your machine alone after boot. Load up a program or whatever then close it again and you'll see its back to around 1/2% It's just done when your machine isn't in use.

Felix E · 18 Nov 2006 at 15:11

Thanks for that, sounds useful anyway! Indexing turned off

byron_hinson · 18 Nov 2006 at 15:40

indexing does happen on start up too so if you don't need it, just disable it in services like the darn firewall.

Caged · 18 Nov 2006 at 16:08

Why would you disable the indexing service? Search is damn useful.

byron_hinson · 18 Nov 2006 at 16:12

Caged said:
Why would you disable the indexing service? Search is damn useful.

As much as it is to a lot of us, there are a load of people who don't actually use it.

FishThrower · 18 Nov 2006 at 16:38

byron_hinson said:
As much as it is to a lot of us, there are a load of people who don't actually use it.

people dont use search?

Datamonkey · 18 Nov 2006 at 16:51

i dont use search

one of the first things to get taken off of the start menu, and disabled.

Why use it, i have an excellent system for organising my files and so on. so have found no need for it.

FishThrower · 18 Nov 2006 at 17:47

Datamonkey said:
i dont use search

one of the first things to get taken off of the start menu, and disabled.

Why use it, i have an excellent system for organising my files and so on. so have found no need for it.

I use it for my Music folder mainly, just type in the name of the artist, and all of their music comes up. Could do it in media player I guess

bledd · 18 Nov 2006 at 18:20

turn things off that you dont need like the sidebar

also, i found disabling the constant file scanning that defender does will speed up your machine a bit

go into defnder, tools, options

disable realtime protection, and set a daily scan instead

csmager · 18 Nov 2006 at 20:49

If your process is causing cached memory to increase and free memory to decrease, sounds like SuperFetch to me.

byron_hinson · 19 Nov 2006 at 00:36

FishThrower said:
people dont use search?

Windows file search - nope.

PinkPig · 19 Nov 2006 at 09:08

FishThrower said:
people dont use search?

Again I don't use search - have never found is inecessary. For music, I use the search in iTunes, for other files I keep them in decent order. Even if I didn't, I don't have enough to make it worth searching.

csmager · 19 Nov 2006 at 10:36

While I'd agree I never used it in XP, it's pretty useful in Vista. Everything's instant, and the start menu search is fantastic. Hit start, type a few letters and it'll search through you start menu, favourites, history, files, emails, email attachments. Makes life so easy.