Windows Vista Vista Home Premium - stop HD-thrashing without loss of performance?

Hi,

My girlfriend's laptop's HDD likes to go crazy, as we all know if common with Vista because Vista = bad (yeah, I said it )

Now, i've seen on the interwebs suggestions such as disabling Superfetch, System Restore, etc., but I believe that these will negatively impact performance, yes? It's not my laptop, so I by no means have the authority to make it slower/laggier/less snappy. However, I also am not going to let it **** 20% or so of the HDD's life away just because M$ has bad programmers / management.

So. What can I do? Does disabling Bit Defender help lower HD activity, without losing performance? I would assume so; my only concern here is that Vista would spit out errors about it all the time.

Any other ideas and methods are greatly appreciated. Thank you

 

What is the performance like now? Vista does a lot of things in the background. You might find that when the system is "being used" (starts doing something), the HDD usage drops.

How installed programs react, that is another question.

Is the system slow? You can turn off background programs using msconfig (I expect you know how it works with turning off startup programs).

Superfetch... look at how to clear it out (I haven't researched it very much). I doubt you need to disable it.

Yes, like you, I remember that it is somebody else's system I am working on. Make a note of the steps you take and be able to reverse them. If you "delete" something, be mindful that it might not be reversed.

Run a full antimalware scan, that might satisfy it for the moment. See if HDD activity drops.

Look at Indexing, Windows may be running that in the background. You can customise the Windows' (Vista's) indexing.

Matt

 

Activity does not stop the HDD usage, unfortunately. Quite the opposite; on boot, there is so much drive activity that it slows down even simple tasks like opening exes and browsing with IE (Yeah, I usually use Firefox, that's just an example)

I disabled BitDefender doing automatic scans of the whole hard drive, it does that something like every 3 days which is 150% retarded and unnecessary. No whining from Vista yet about that (yay!)

Also disabled per BlackViper the Windows Search (SearchIndexer.exe). Both of these seem to have helped HDD usage / thrashing, but it definitely is still present.

Let's use today as an example: After enter my gf's username and password, the HDD activity light was solid (i.e. constant activity) for six minutes. SIX MINUTES of high disk usage, beginning immediately after logging in. That is ridiculous and unnacceptable.

[edited]

 

Oh, shoot. I guess I just did a RTFM huh

Thanks; removed.

 

Thanks for editing your thread.

I tried to offer you some manual methods of overcoming the background activity.

No disrespect Evan, but "killing" things may not tell you what the cause is.

The problem seems to be limited to startup now.

You could try a "clean boot" or, the other avenue I would consider, is malware (and that might not be an underhand program/s, but programs that have been installed and can do what they like because it was accepted in the Agreement) try running Spybot.

Have you checked msconfig?

Matt