Windows Vista always so busy!

neoglow · 12 Jul 2012 at 21:09

Ive got XP and Vista 64bit on dual boot with my rig.

I find Vista so damn slow sometimes, the HDD is madly clicking away for ages when all I want to do is load internet explorer or open a document and it takes forever.

With XP, almost like clockwork, after logging in it loads up its usual stuff and then goes completely silent until I open something. With Vista the damn HDD never shuts the hell up, whats it doing/loading/farting around with all the time?

Ive read about this Pre-fetch or Super-fetch, how do you turn these damn things off, I know M$ probably made them to speed things up but it seems to be the opposite!

Azuse05 · 12 Jul 2012 at 21:39

Both vista and windows 7 take a few minutes to start after you're on the desktop, windows just pauses for a couple minutes for the people in a hurry. Turning either service off will slow thing's down.

If you want instant start either put the machine to sleep (basically what windows 8 does which is why it boots in half the time) or buy an ssd. If you've got raptors it's the only way to speed things up anyway.

darael · 13 Jul 2012 at 10:54

Bootup and login to Vista, and leave it for an hour - hopefully the activity will be much less by that time. Usually it's just Vista trying to catchup on tasks it hasn't been able to complete.

edscdk · 13 Jul 2012 at 11:02

you need 4gb of ram ideally for a 64bit OS

delete everythign out of the startup folder / registry keys.

disable the search services (dont stop pre-fetch) there are usualyl two of the suckers

run a defrag

make sure your AV is not doing a startup scan / scheduled scan... use a light weight AV like MS SE,

do a clean install if its an old install

FallshirmjAEger · 13 Jul 2012 at 11:54

Open up resource monitor & click the drop down arrow where it says 'Disk'.

From there you can organise the list of programs by what is causing the most writes.

On my screen shot below, you can see its the system process writing to the master file table at about 11mb. Can you post a similar screen shot?

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

V F · 14 Jul 2012 at 03:01

Azuse05 said:
Both vista and windows 7 take a few minutes to start after you're on the desktop, windows just pauses for a couple minutes for the people in a hurry. Turning either service off will slow thing's down.

Windows 7 is instant on mine with a mechanical. Vista on the other hand is not. It's a hard drive grinder. The only thing that grinds 7 for a minute is the Anti-virus.

edscdk said:
you need 4gb of ram ideally for a 64bit OS

The op is. It even grinds away for 5 minutes everytime for me with 8GB. It's a fairly clean install with everything up to speed and updated.

Even during idle or screensaver or screen sleep, Vista grinds away for ages. As 7 does not.

Rroff · 14 Jul 2012 at 03:58

You can disable some of the indexing and remove certain entries from the task scheduler to help but really nothing makes a huge difference short of upgrading to win 7.

Tuvoc · 14 Jul 2012 at 06:00

Vista always does this on a fresh boot. But the longer you leave it on, the better it becomes. But I won't run Vista on less than 8GB of RAM. On my machine with 8GB, Vista is as smooth as silk (yes I said that) but on my 4GB machine it is merely tolerable. This is where Windows 7 shines. I put W7 on the latter machine, and it is much better.

Azuse05 · 14 Jul 2012 at 09:54

V F said:
Windows 7 is instant on mine with a mechanical. Vista on the other hand is not. It's a hard drive grinder. The only thing that grinds 7 for a minute is the Anti-virus.

Not true. W7 boots instantly, then pauses for a few minutes and then gradually fills the ram and run the background service tasks - however it does so conservatively so the user doesn't notice while vista tries to do it asap. Also remember the op posted right after patch Tuesday. Took my laptops several hours to sort the fluf out after that.

Vista, once fully patched, is a good os. It just takes a bit longer than w7 to sort itself out but like w7 it works, but as soon as you try "improving" things witthout knowing what you're doing you end up making things worse.

Also don't believe 95% of what you negatively read relating to vista or w7 - it's just the regular hate-rumourmonger you find in most game lobbys/youtube. Very little if any is based on fact.

Tuvoc · 14 Jul 2012 at 10:00

Also depends on your hard drive... the Vista disk activity used to annoy me, but then I replaced my hard drive which happened to be much quieter, and now I simply don't notice it anymore.

Korsun · 15 Jul 2012 at 22:59

Got fed up with Vista 64 constantly updating and crashing, switched to Windows 7 all is now calm and working fine

Blackjack Davy · 15 Jul 2012 at 23:48

It's almost always the search function indexing all the files on the drives. Either leave it alone for a few hours to let it catalog everything or turn it off and use a better search engine such as Everything.exe

Do a a search for services.msc to find it and other services you can disable.

mame · 16 Jul 2012 at 17:35

If you only use Windows Vista (or any Windows) now and again on your dual-boot, then it will be always downloading updates. I always found Vista fine. When I reinstalled Windows 7 on my new SSD a few weeks ago, it was downloading and installing updates left, right and centre. It's instant now.