stop the hard drive thrashing in vista

Here's how you restore your performance and stop the dreaded thrashing.

1. Turn Off System Restore
Go to Control Panel/System/Advanced System Settings. Select System protection and untick the available drive. You might have to wait a bit because it will probably say searching.

2. Disable "Windows Search" Service
Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/services from the control panel. Right click properties, press stop and set startup type to disabled.

3. Disable "SuperFetch"
Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/services from the control panel
Right click properties, press stop and set startup type to disabled.

4. Turn off drive indexing.
Right click on the drive from my computer and uncheck "Index this drive for faster searching"


your laptop battery should love you after these tweaks!

this was taken from another forum and i just thought id post it here and see if it would come in handy for some of you!

 

I recommend leaving the System Restore and Superfetch on. System Restore is an important tool for recovery in the event of a computer disaster. Superfetch will settle in after roughly 1 week with minimal hard disk thrashing/

 

Search & Indexing are set to "power saving" by default in Vista power saving plan which basically means indexing does not work and search service tries to put minimal load on hard drive. I have both services enabled and hard drive LED is not blinking at all with this power plan whereas it sometimes likes to do sth when computer is idle on "maximum performance" plan.
BTW battery life is very similar to what I had on XP- Vista switches off a lot of things when running in power saving mode.

 

I agree with everything except Superfetch; leave that on.

 

Disabling superfetch is not good.it make everything fast

 

is it like Prefetch in XP ? if so I want it off

 

No different than prefetch. leave it on

Windows Vista's SuperFetch and ReadyBoost Analyzed

 

They both exist in Vista, and it is possible to turn them both off, or to turn them down, but I don't know why you would do that.

 

I used to get lots of problems with Prefetch on XP and I used to use a program that would keep it clean for me, anyone know of one for Vista.

 

USE CCLEANER 2.0

 

Yes, i agree.

SuperFetch actually speed up things that you open frequently, so why bother turning it off? In fact, if you're worry about ram usage, use ReadyBoost share the burden.

 

whats drive thrashing mean does it do this with xp

 

All the things anthony mentioned to stop Hard drive trashing by Vista can also be done in XP (except for th superfetch thing), so yes, I think you can stop the Hard drive trashing of xp too

 

not the kind of cleaner I meant as I use that already, I had one that specific for Prefetch on XP and it allowed you to change the setting of it and leave it.

 

I use CCleaner with Includes/Excludes to remove the .pf files prefetcher/superfetch creates.

This is a way to tune prefetcher/superfetch.

 

Exactly the same steps I took, except I do not disable SuperFetch. And I can actually use Readyboost, as long as I keep the Readyboost cache size around 512MB, the thrashing doesnt last long after bootup/resume.