Vista HD activity driving me nuts!

[kevman]

So I've been trying to give vista a fair chance since I got it with a new laptop but I think I've had it. Right out of the box it felt slower than my 5 year old laptop so the first thing i did was wipe it clean, re partition the drive to eliminate the dell recovery section and reinstall vista. I'm happy I've gotten rid of the bloatware but I can't seem to solve my latest problem. The HD runs non stop! I've disabled searching, indexing and super fetch as well as a few others but I still get non stop HD activity. Any other ideas? Time for Windows 7 beta? Man vista is driving me nuts!!!

[Traditional_Ale]

[kevman]

Originally Posted by Traditional_Ale

Believe me, I'm well on my way...

[cKy]

Try Windows 7. I find it already better then Vista, performance wise and style wise. If you are gonna blow out your machine to put XP on anyways, may as well demo the new one out.

[photon]

How long have you had it, Vista will do a whole bunch of stuff that chews the hard drive when you first install.. leave it on and chugging for a good long while (overnight) and it should get better.

Unless you just don't have enough RAM.

[Rathji]

I agree, RAM is probably your issue. 2 gigs min to run Vista with Aero disabled IMHO.

I run Vista on 2 year old entry level Dell laptop w/ 2 gigs of ram and the only issues I have come from ripping a DVD while trying to do pretty much anything else.

[cal_guy]

Index search and superfetch are the two best things about Vista, I recommend that you do not disable these two features. In order to check what is using your disk open your start menu and search for "reliability and performance monitor" (you don't have to enter the entire phrase) and click on the disk tab.

[ricosuave]

I second the notion to try windows 7 - im upgrading my vista ultimate to the windows 7 beta as we speak - it was flying on an old athlon 1.8 I had around...

[llama64]

Turn indexing and superfetch back on!!

If you have 2GB of ram, double it.

If you have an accelerator card with on board ram, Aero will run just fine.

Open up your process list and look for the process that is eating disk time. Vista has an amazing resources utility which makes this a lot easier then in XP.

You might have an errant process going nuts that you can disable. My Vista machine did - turned out it was some stupid third party driver updater.

[dobbles]

having given vista a second try, i have went back to xp again.

i first tried vista at work back when the enterprise edition first got released. december of 06 or something? the whole IT department was trying it to get used to it for when users inevitably had problems. it was buggy as all getout and we all eventually went back to XP. i made it the longest; something like 7 or 8 months.

so after that experience, i pretty much hated vista and uninstalled it off any new computers i bought personally. a few months back i finally decided to give it another go now that its had time to settle and work out its kinks. it totally nerfed my laptop. the single core mobile processor couldn't keep up and even 2 gigs of ram wasn't enough to salvage it. my desktop wasn't so bad as far as performance as it had a dual core in it and a good video card. but my video card (6600gt) was a bit old and never got along with vista and caused all sorts of problems. i tried different drivers and various setting but always had problems. actually just bit the bullet and did a low level reformat of that computer last night.

long story short, i personally feel like after all this time vista should be a lot more usable. it just seems silly that so many workarounds are still needed to make vista a decent operating system. not to mention its still pretty silly that you should need such a good computer to run it. sure, powerful computers are cheap and prevalent these days, but that doesn't mean i should have to use 50% of my system just to power the OS.

/end rant.