I have a laptop with Vista 64-bit and am being annoyed by a really long delay from when the time the desktop shows up to the time it becomes actually usable. My laptop is a rather fast one and I have 4GB of RAM, so I dont think the specs are the bottleneck here, it's gotta be a specific program or service.
Heres what happens:
1) I log in
2) Desktop, taskbar, and sidebar appear almost immediately -- some programs load and show up in the system tray.
3) The hard drive light is flashing like the harddrive is under very heavy load, for 2 minutes -- the sidebar shows the CPU usage at a mere ~20% for both cores. If I ctrl-alt-del, the task manager shows no more than 5% of any given process.
4) FINALLY I will get a notification that wireless and bluetooth are both on. Programs like firefox will launch slower while the hard drive continues to grind
5) After 5 total minutes from logging in the hard drive light will stop and everything will work quickly.
I want to isolate what the problem is so that I can fix it but the task manager doesnt give me useful info (because the whole problem seems to be related to disk i/o and not CPU or RAM usage). Can anyone point me in the right direction?
A serious defragging needed perhaps? But i have a feeling thats something you would have thought of...
Defrag and clean you registry too?
I'll try these. Somehow I doubt that the long startup time has to do with fragmentation for varying reasons. What i'm really looking for is a program or method I can use which will tell me what is doing the most Disk I/O at the current time so that I can identify what program or service is causing the problem.
tbh, i have vista on both my laptop and desktop. both arnt that old and the laptop has the highest specs, but the desktop does take ages to become useable.
its most annoying on the laptop when i want to change the power plan from 'high performance' to 'power saver' takes freakin ages for the box to come up even when i click the icon on the taskbar.
Hey James are both of your computers Home Premium (32-bit)? Or is any of them a 64 bit one.
While your HD is thrashing, turn on Task manager (or better yet, Process Explorer from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) ). Turn on the I/O reads or delta reads column, and sort by it to see what process(es) are thrashing your HD.
-- GSH
Welcome to windows my friend.
Windows Vista is supposed to defrag your HD on spare cycles now like Linux although they still recommend you schedule a defrag time and let it run once in a while. It sounds like you have a security related task at startup like a startup anti-virus scan or something along those lines that is taking up your I/O.
I'm running XP and it takes at least 5 minutes to even reach the logon screen... things are so bad I'm considering getting an external, backing up to it, and completely reformatting my PC...
Both mine are 32-bit, i believe one is vista ultimate and the other is home premium, not entirely sure. The laptop has 3GB ram, while the desktop has two.
Sysinternal's Autoruns (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx) is a neat utility that looks at everything that loads at startup including programs, services, drivers, browser hooks, etc. You can use this utility to find anything that you don't want loading or even better, find drivers that it is trying to load that no longer exists. The system wastes some cycles trying to load drivers that are no longer around.
Thanks for mentioning ProcessExplorer -- you know I did have it but I didn't explore it too much until recently where I discovered where you could also show other stats on a process including I/O history which seems useful. Turning on most of the I/O columns doesnt appear to show me anything I can use. I tried terminating non-essential processes which were using the most I/O (like Steam) but something still tries to use my hard drive for about 10 minutes from startup. I'll just have to look harder I guess.
Using Process Explorer v10.2 on my home XP box (v10.2 is the last version before MS bought them out and removed the 'google this exe's name' link), if I right-click on the listview titlebar and go to 'Select Columns', the best ones to look at are Process Performance -> I/O Delta Reads, and I/O Delta Read Bytes. Maybe also I/O Delta Writes. The 'Delta' ones will show the change since the last time Process Explorer refreshed, and you can sort by a column to see who's reading/writing to your HD.
-- GSH
Ah so 'delta' measures the 'rate' of increase or decrease -- kind of how it works in BZ2. Got it.
No, it's not rates. It's "how much since last time." It can't ever be negative. For example, consider this case:
Time 0: 50Kb read
Time 1: 50Kb read
Time 2: 100Kb read
Time 3: 100Kb read
That's the raw amount read, and would show up in the I/O Read Bytes column. But, the delta column would look like this:
Time 0: 0
Time 1: 0
Time 2: 50Kb read
Time 3: 0
As I said, it's how much has changed in the absolute number since it last displayed the count. Most apps that are just sitting there have 0 for I/O delta read/writes. Apps that are hitting your disk have values over 0.
-- GSH
How long have you had the user account for? It might be easier just to delete the user and create another one -- depending on how you have your files set up and such. On my brother's lappy, he just painlessly makes a new user every couple months.
EDIT: spelling.
Quote from: sabrebattletank on April 06, 2009, 11:09:16 PM
How long have you had the use account for? It might be easier just to delete the user and create another one -- depending on how you have your files set up and such. On my brother's lappy, he just painlessly makes a new user every couple months.
WHY? Its fairly easy to manage your user to keep it clean and tidy.
for precisely this reason: you get things like fun startup times and jaunx.
If you don't figure out what it is in your user account causing the issue, you are likely doomed to repeat. And the issue could still be in the global startup routines which would not be solved by creating a new user/profile.
Quote from: sabrebattletank on April 06, 2009, 11:09:16 PM
How long have you had the user account for? It might be easier just to delete the user and create another one -- depending on how you have your files set up and such. On my brother's lappy, he just painlessly makes a new user every couple months.
EDIT: spelling.
I have tried that... it takes AGES and I would have to do it for all four users.
Do you use BZLognLaunch? I find that when I have big log, it takes a long time to move it.
Quote from: Sonic on April 07, 2009, 02:48:01 AM
If you don't figure out what it is in your user account causing the issue, you are likely doomed to repeat. And the issue could still be in the global startup routines which would not be solved by creating a new user/profile.
True -- unless its something you did once and then forgot about, never to do again.
i seem to develop one problem with windos platforms of any kind after a few months, and that is an svchost.exe process hogging all my cpu time for about half-an-hour.
i recently defragged my Laptop harddisk. i wonder if itll help much at next bootup...
i seem to get this mysterious "explorer.exe" task and "system idle process" taking up all my jaunx...
hmmmm...