HDD hard faults in Vista

Hi all,

Just got a new Asus n80vn laptop. It runs well with some exceptions. I was installing a patch on Medieval II:Total war the other day and it was going quite slow. I went to the performance monitor and found I was getting as much as 1600+ hard faults/sec. During regular usage there is an occasional hard fault here or there, but nothing close to that. I turned off my anti-virus scanner and I was still getting the hard faults during the patch.

Is this normal for Vista? Seems to me like something is wrong here. The patch install should have been limited by the HDD speed, which can easily handle at the very least 30mb/sec. The HDD was only running around 5-7mb/sec during the install though.

This kind of garbage is making me lean heavily towards re-installing XP. This system is no slouch (p8600, 4gb ram, 9650gt), so it shouldn't be having these problems IMO. My experience with Vista is it provides basically the same services as XP with minor upgrades, but buries most of it under a pile of flaming dog-poo. There is nothing logical about the interface as most of the power-user options are found deep within sub-folders. But I digress, really I was just wondering about the hard faults.

 

Switching to XP isn't going to do anything about your problem (except make it harder to find without a tool like Resource Monitor)...

A hard fault is when an address of memory is requested and the OS has to pull it off the HD (in the page file) and it can't use the stuff in RAM (as it was paged out when it shouldn't have been)...

So a ton of hard faults either means you're running a lot of memory instensive stuff and you don't have RAM open (forcing constant paging to and from the HD) or you have a hardware problem (like bad RAM)...

 

Would it be possible Vista is mis-managing the memory system to create this type of problem? I notice in task manager that almost all available system memory is cached, so there is very little "free."

I wasn't running memory intensive apps during the install, so that isn't the problem. There is 3.25gigs usable RAM in my machine, so page-file usage should be minimal. I think I'll have to do some memtest runs to see if it brings up any hardware issues.

 

I heard of Vista memory hog, but never mis-managing ; matter of fact, I personally believe that Vista is the best memory managing OS that Microsoft ever introduced.

Could be true, Vista will use all available memory, when and where applicable.

Pagefile usage is not the same as pagefile setting. Are you thinking about a "smaller" pagefile?

Good idea!

cheers ...

 

I probably used the wrong words there. What I meant is since most of the memory is cached, does it access the pagefile more frequently (subsequently leading to hard faults)? I'm just speculating here, as I'm definitely not well versed in this topic.

I am familiar with pagefile usage vs. pagefile setting. I had two patches to install and initially I had the pagefile set to 2gb on the storage partition of the HDD. I thought that might be the problem so I changed the pagefile to system managed size on the OS partition and restarted. Then I installed the 2nd patch and the problem still persisted.

 

I think the problem is likely due to the patch extracting the files from an archive to a temp directory--so the computer has to hit the harddrive. It has more to do with patch design than vista. The patch designer has no way of knowing how much memory you have so rather than let windows deal with it (as he probably should have), he probably designed the program to extract files to a temp directory first, then write to the end location.

I've seen perfectly screaming machines due this on other patches--Battlefield games come to mind

 

Cache memory is dropped as soon as a program needs to access it. The idea is to load up as much as possible with files you need, have needed, will use or may use so that if / when you need them they are available instantly rather than having to wait for the HDD to get around to fetching them.

To be honest the problems do sound like a poorly written patch program.

BTW, if you want to see poorly written installers you should try the Spore install from DVD, can take up to 5 hours as the installer reads a sector from the edge of the disc and then re-reads the index tracks causing the DVD head to move back and forward continuously during the install, but then what do you expect from EA.