High hard disk activity? Superfetch?

I've been noticing that, especially the first 5-10 minutes after startup, I get really high hard disk activity on Windows 7, at least relative to XP. The hard disk light is on most of the time during this period (even though it's booted up in less than a minute), and I can hear the hard drive spinning. So I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this in Win7.

At first I ignored it, thinking it was System Restore. But System Restore was only taking up 370 MB, and after disabling it, I still had the high activity.

I then disabled write caching on my disk, and this seemed to slightly decrease activity. But it was still pretty high during the first 10 minutes or so, and a bit more than XP's average thereafter.

I'm thinking now it might be superfetch - I brought up Task Manager and noticed that the Free Memory was falling at about 6-16 MB every update interval during the 5-10 minute period that the hard drive had high activity, and that after it stabilized at about 1 GB Free (out of 4 GB), the hard disk activity dramatically dropped. Since XP uses a much lighter Prefetch that doesn't usually seem to use much more than 100 MB, I'm thinking the 2000 MB or so that Superfetch is using could be causing the surge of activity.

So is anyone else noticing this? I'm considering disabling Superfetch in services.msc to see if this decreases activity, as it's rather ridiculous right now.

 

Try disabling Windows Search (Indexing) service and see if that helps.

 

Its applications and services that are set to delayed start up. Windows 7 tries to get a usable system by only starting up the services and programs that are needed to get the desktop up and usable, all other services like Windows search etc are delayed to start after the desktop has loaded which will cause the HDD access light to keep working for a while after the system has loaded. These delayed programs will always load with a lower priority than anything you start yourself so it should not interfere with how windows is working.

Personally I would re-enable write caching and then let the system settle down over about a week so that windows can work out the quickest way to load all the files and drivers. The fact that Windows is still loading stuff after the desktop has loaded is not a bad thing, MS really has made the choice of a quick time to desktop with some things still working and loading in the background under Windows 7 / Vista or a long start up with everything ready to go under XP.

 

That seems to have really helped! It also appears to have effectively canceled out Superfetch - my free memory is staying around 2800 MB now, rather than 1000 MB. But hard drive activity is much more XP-esque now, which is a nice change of pace.

I can see where that would be useful on a computer with slow startup time. But my Windows 7 and XP startup times are already near-identical. Right now though, the hard drive light is going full-speed on Win7 for 10 times as long as it does in XP (though they're both responsive in the same amount of time). Some of this might pay off later, but it's rather excessive as it is now.

Or maybe I'm just too used to the idyllic performance of XP. It already does everything I want fast enough that I can't complain, so I'm probably more apt to notice any decreases than increases.

 

My disk activity with 7 is nothing compared to when I boot Vista.