neorichieb1971 wrote:Well, I don't know if norton is to blame but doing a vista healthcheck I get a red alert on my average disc queue time which = 7.
In the past 3 months I think system resources are clashing like dodgem cars because my HDD C: drive stays constantly on. I have investigated lots of things and I've had a norton specialist remote in on my computer but all he did was change the startup programs and do a disk cleanup, all things i'm accustomed to doing myself.
I can't seem to win actually. When all services are running my computer runs like a moped pulling a bus up a 45 degree incline.
If I turn off
Superfetch
Windows Search
Windows live update
I get semi good performance. But what baffles me most is that 1 year ago I never had any issues with this computer with ALL those turned on. Why has my HDD decided to stay on? About 2 weeks ago it took 30 minutes from boot up before I had control of my PC simply because whatever it did during boot up was so intensive I couldn't even left click anything. Even then I had miserable performance. Disk access was through the roof hence turning off the above. Superfetch is the biggest culprit, the HDD almost stops dead as soon as I turn that off. CPU never goes higher than 30%.
What really throws me is that I rebuilt the PC from scratch using the restore partition 2 months ago for this very reason, but its still doing it. GRRRR.
Could this be hardware related? Like for example is my system paging a lot due to malfunctioning HDD or memory?
My system score is 2.6, which is the base line score for Aero system graphics. It is a laptop running vista with 2gb memory. All checks apart from avg disk queue time are passing tests. I am using 25gb of a 60gb drive.
Strangely enough windows mail cripples my pc when receiving mail. Lately youtubes are stuttering, but its not a buffer issue in the normal sense.. The sound sort of reverberates out of the speaker like a bottle neck is happening somewhere.
Sounds hardware related to me. How much ram do you have in your rig? Could be a paging issue with your hard drive. A lot of times hard drives that are slow do to high activity are cause by a lack of sufficient ram. Makes the hard drive take up the slack and bogs it down with excessive paging. This has been a MAJOR cause for issues with Vista, especially 64 bit, and I've still had people have issues with it in Win7.
**EDIT**
Oops, just saw you have 2 gigs of memory, if you're on 32 bit vista you should be ok with 2 gigs but obviously I'd be cutting down on the amount of programs running simultaneously if you're having issues. If it's slow on start up it's probably because like you mentioned, you have a lot of resource intensive programs going and Vista allocates most of the RAM it will need later on when booting.
I ran Vista 32-bit on a T7700 with 3GB of memory - it didn't seem abnormally slow to me; about equal with WinXP on a Core 2 Duo (both are the same speed; the advantages of Vista and the extra gig vs. the advantages of XP and the Core 2 Duo's bigger cache and faster bus speed seemed to make it all a wash, roughly).
Mine is a T5300 2gb ram, 80gb HDD but 20 of it used as a shadow partition.
Superfetch and Windows search cause most of the disk activity. Disabling them makes running programs slower in one way, but faster in another. With windows search running there is always indexing going on. If I look at the resource monitor the HDD is always showing indexing going on. But the thing that bothers me is that there is no way to tell what percent of it is done. If you can see a % of it done you can see how long its going to take.
The other thing that crops up is the paging file. It seems to get written an awful lot even though 45% of the memory is phyically free. I do not understand that at all.
For the time being i'm going to do a defrag every 24 hours.
This morning I booted up at 05:00 and by 05:25 I could not physically use the machine. Everything I clicked on went into wait state immediately with "Firefox is not responding" and it stays that way for 5 minutes sometimes. The HDD light is FULL on, it never blinks. Its on full beam and never goes out for at least 15 minutes after boot up. This is without starting anything. I've had 2 professionals look at my computer and both agree the startup programs are just normal ones that any vista system would have.
On my laptop I have a game called world of goo, Klite codecs and some pictures and Utorrent. That is it besides the normal vista stuff. I have msn, skype as well and some logitech drivers for the cam. That is the entire contents of my HDD.
I have 53 services running, norton internet security. For some strange reason my vista score is 2.6.. About 6 months ago it was 3.0.
This all started 4 months ago. Before that I never had any HDD issues.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
I doubt that fragmentation is your issue. Unlike FAT, most modern file systems fragment slowly and usually do some amount of "on-line" defragging as part of their normal operation. They can't totally avoid fragmentation, particularly on a full drive/partition, but it's much less of an issue than it was 10-15 years ago.
Some writing to the page file even with physical RAM free is normal, though I don't know how much is normal. It's part of the overall memory management strategy of pretty much any modern PC operating system.
Have you done a full surface scan of the hard drive (preferably with a self-booting utility from the manufacturer, bypassing Windows entirely)? I've seen weird performance issues that turned out to be the HDD taking a long time to respond when reading failing sectors.
Windows is now warning me the C: drive is about to die, the last time I used it, it blue screened on me. Everytime I boot up I get "Your hard drive is showing struggling signs, please back it up immediately then find if you need to fix it or replace it, F1-continue"
I'm going to clone the drive and put a 250GB WD in there.
I'm thinking this would be a good time to change my norton to something more resource friendly as well. I'm hearing so many things from so many people its confusing.
I was thinking the Avast-Malwarebytes combo
Then MSE with Windows firewall
Not sure..
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
