Vista - Vista Excessive Disk Activity

For the past few weeks I have been attempting to create a Vista Home
Premium configuration on a new Core 2 Duo PC. I though that I had
finally created a stable config with all the proper hardware drivers and
many of my apps. I then noticed that the disk activity light was on
solid - and I couldn't figure out why.

I ran a number of process tools, the only one that seemed to provide
useful information being Perfmon. Perfmon showed two distinct types of
disk activity.


The first, was causing the disk activity light to stay on solid, and was
caused by the reading of files on my D: data disk. I found that by
stopping/starting the SysMain Superfetch service I can turn off/turn on
this constant disk read activity. It appears that Superfetch looks
through previously opened user data files - even if they were used only
once, are 4+GB in size, and may never be used again from within VISTA.
It is beyond my comprehension what possible good this type of activity
would do me, or any other VISTA user. After I get to the point where
I've installed Lightroom/Photoshop/Picasa/PaperPort and other apps that
routinely access and/or index GB of user files - will access to my D:
drive ever stop? Why would Superfetch bother with non-executable data
files on a non-system partition? After reading the MS VISTA Kernel
description I know that turning off SuperFetch will impact certain VISTA
features - so what?.


Second issue: I noticed a secondary disk activity that consists of
continuous writes to various files on C: that occur at the rate of a few
each second. Again, I attempted to isolate that IO activity with
Perfmon, including noting the PIDs and then attempting to stop the
Applications with that PID - with no success.

In an attempt to further diagnose the issues, I restored a C: partition
backup for the first OOTB Vista configuration (no updates, drivers, apps
installed). The steady drone of repeated disk writes to C: also occurs
in that base build. The disk writes involves areas such as:

files lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat
from svchost LocalSystemNetworkRestricted.

c:\windows\system32\config\SOFTWARE
c:\$Logfile (NTFS Volume Log)
c:\windows\System32\config\DEFAULT
from System

This is my only Vista system, so I have none other to compare it to.

I've turned off Indexing, turned off Defender, uninstalled AVG, turned
off disk defrags, and disabled all items in the Scheduler - the C: disk
activity goes on.

I find all this disk IO activity unwanted, distracting, and possibly
damaging to disk drive health in the long term. I don't understand why
this type of activity should be necessary for a single-user desktop PC
and why it is so darned difficult to determine what is causing it.

I'd appreciate any assistance in explaining what this constant disk C:
write activity might be, what other diagnostic tools I could use to
isolate the causes, and how to stop it (other than to install WINXP or
buy a Mac).

Have you tried right-clicking on the Task Bar, and bringing up Task Manager
to see what is going on?
--
Mick Murphy - Qld - Australia


"rbd" wrote:

rbd wrote:
You could try right clicking on the dis drive icon and in properties
turn off "Index this drive..." whatever. Seems like that made a
difference fo me, and since I rarely use "Search" functions the indexing
time is just wasted.

Atleast I am not alone, on this. I also found the virus program, spy
program, etc doesn't matter if they are off. The problem still happens.
Although common sense says this, it can't be left out. The drive can't be
scanned for errors. You get a "drive can't be scanned when in use." Right now
the accessing has been giong on for almost a week. The version used is vista
basic. With posting what they are microsoft may need to look into this. Even
indexing is off.
"Charlie Tame" wrote:

Just wanted to let you know I'm having the same problems. Nothing gets me so totally mad as when the hard drive is going crazy. I intensely hope that it is not a virus spreading around the drive

For the record, I've turned off:
*indexing
*defragmenting (I use this manually instead)
*page file (has 8 GB RAM - no need for page file)
*superfetch (from services.msc - not generally recommended)

Hi,

More likely excessive paging, and disabling superfetch only makes it worse.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

"Ursa" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:2c1c051b3c2dc0576bc1d3de45af4ccd@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

Forgot to mention that I've turned off my paging file too found the superfetch tip in another forum. But I'll turn that one back on.

Bad tip, as is disabling the paging file (unless of course you like 'out of
memory' errors and slow performance).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

"Ursa" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:08621d049bf97ebeaa57c395db4ebc99@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

Well there is one thing a lot of us forget.

Most of us have more than one computer and therefore have a router.
Routers generally have a firewall. If we do nothing it tends to protect us.

If no router is present then you need to look to see if your drive
activity is because the computer is somehow compromised. Yes Vista
(Allegedly) has a "Firewall" but despite MS' best efforts if Vista is
compromised then the Vista firewall also is vulnerable.


ronnie wrote:

Rick - thank you for your reply.

Definitely not excessive paging - just read activity to very specific
data files and write activity to very specific VISTA files.

I'll gladly turn Superfetch back on if anyone tell me how to keep it
from reading through every data file that I've ever opened - including
5+GB data and backup files. So far, disabling Superfetch has only made
things much better. (Unless Perfmon and my disk activity light are lying.)

Rick Rogers wrote: