Vista - Heavy drive activity followed by application not responding.

Wondering if anyone can offer some troubleshooting tips.

Periodically, a Windows Home Premium PC will engage in heavy drive
activity, usually accessing the page file, thumbcache, searchindexer
or a windows media 360 file ( forget the file name). When this drive
activity occurs and an application is closed (usually IE, Windows
Explorer), the application will hang briefly and often times stop
responding.

So far I've tried:

1. Defrag -a command. Volume is 0% fragmented.
2. SFC / SCANNOW -- everything checked out.
3. A checkdisk on startup. Everything was OK.

Crashes have lowered the System Stability Chart to a 5.7 reading --
and falling.

Any Windows experts able to suggest some other things to try out?
Thanks!

I have similar problems with a Dell Inspiron 1525, Vista Home Premium SP1
system. Under any application I use my hard drive seems to freeze up and
takes about 5 minutes to free itself. This happens multiple times a day at
random. All activity on the system stops and I can do nothing but wait. No
mouse control either. I am running McAfee Security Center 8.1 and am
current on all updates. Would like some help in finding a resolution as this
is highly frustrating. Thanks in advance.

--
John


John Marshall
Cell707)-364-3539
mail4marshall@xxxxxx
"md" <mdkrantz@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:a290f20e-d2b5-4457-abbb-8ed10186d580@xxxxxx

Interesting that you're having the issue, too. With some unscientific
research, this issue appears to be more frequent on Dell PCs, but I've
read users of other brands having it too. Not sure how widespread it
is, since my HP laptop runs great on Vista and has never experienced
this issue.

How much RAM do you have? I installed an additional 2GB this week, for
a total of 4GB, and Vista appears to be able to use a total of 3GB.
That seems to help, slightly. Was aware Vista wouldn't use all 4GB,
but thought the available number would be closer to 3.5GB. Wonder if
this is part of the issue?

Also, what type of hard drive controller to you have?

I'm completely guessing, but I also wonder if the issue has something
to do with Vista's SuperFetch feature. This link provides some
information on how SuperFetch works: http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html

Does anyone know adding a second page file on my second internal drive
(which doesn't contain the OS) might help?

Did some tinkering, and have been able to reduce the "not responding"
issue a bit. Did all the following things at around the same time, so
unable to isolate what actually helped. Some of the things I've
tried:

1. Added 2GB of RAM. Takes system to 4GB (although 32-bit OS cannot
take full advantage of all 4).
2. Switched to ATI video card with more RAM than previous nVidia
7300LE card. Important: Uninstalled the Nvidia drivers. Errors still
occured until the Nvidia drivers were uninstalled using the Programs
option in control panel.
3. Removed Adobe 7.0 startup item using Windows Defender. System has
Acrobat 9.0, so not sure why Adobe 7.0 was even in the computer much
less loading itself automatically.
4. Removed a "filter" called AC3Filter. Used these steps:
A. Find ac3filter.ax file.
B. Start the command prompt as an administrator. This is important
since step C may fail if you don't. Right click on cmd and run as
administrator (in Vista).
C. Unregister this module from command line: regsvr32 /u x:
\some_dir
\ac3filter.ax
D. Delete registry key HKCU\Software\AC3Filter
E. Reboot the computer (you may not be able to do step F unless you
reboot first).
F. Find and delete files ac3filter.ax and ac3filter.cpl if it is on
your PC