Vista Ultimate X86: 100% CPU/Heavy HD Thrashing ?

Well I decided to take a shot at Vista once more after hearing all this praise about how SP1 has solved many users' issues with the OS. Unfoutunately this has not been the case for me. After activating Vista my issues actually became worse than better.

My specs should slice through Vista without such severe lag (severe enough the start menu takes about 2 seconds to load then 4 to be usable)

Vostro 1500

C2D T7100
4.0 Gb ram (3.5 gb being used and read by OS)
320gb 5400rpm
Nvidia 8600m GT Gddr2

My Vista is tuned with mainly black vipers "tweaked vista" settings, indexing and search turned off, transparency/aero is on.

Even typing is laggy. I have all drivers up to date as well as bios.

Vista has been unusably sluggish as well as constant internet browsing issues and therefore have not even had a chance to test a single game. The slugishness must be related to what I will be writing next but the internet browsing issue I am not sure. Constantly after going to a page it will not load until I hit the enter button after clicking on the URL once more.

I am having a general 100% CPU usage at times dropping down to a minimum of 80%.

I belive the csrss.exe is responsible for this with its 120, 000 up to 2, 000, 000 reading. I have 1 csrss.exe process if I do not click "Perform Administrative Tasks". After clicking "Perform Administrative Tasks" one more csrss.exe process appears.

Also after clicking "Perform Administrative Tasks" the following processes allso cause slight concern:

10 X svchost.exe (combined 40,000 write aswell as 77mb ram)
2 X rundll32.exe
2 X taskeng.exe
1 X lsass.exe which has higher reads and writes the firefox.


I am also having heavy hard drive thrashing. I can also constantly hear my hard drive spinnning not just thrashing. I have never had a hard drive that shakes a laptop from spinning so hard. This issue does not happen with XP Home X86. The hard drive is a Hitachi Travelstar 5k320.

Thanks in advance

 

Disable the Superfetch service, do not disable the Readyboost service.

Your HD might be faulty?

 

Your computer is probably indexing all your files but once its finish it should be fine.

 

Disabled super fetch but no fix

HDD is fine not faulty after enough tests with XP.

Learn to read please and not trying to just get a higher post count as it is stated that indexing and searching has been disabled.

 

Which of these have the most cpu utilization ??

Try disabling automatic updates for the moment, and see if that improves anything.

You can also try and update any out-dated drivers.

Plus, download Process Explorer, and check the baby processes....

You mean 2GB memory used up by csrss.exe ??

(Never terminate csrss.exe)

 

Auto updates are disabled.

Funilly it is my touchpad driver (newest one available) that has the highest PID rating at around 3500.

Ill install Process Explorer now.

Edit installed Process Explorer what should I be looking for specifically

 

Nothing to worry about PID.
Check and break-down the process with the max/above average CPU and RAM utilization.

 

It shows firefox is using the most of everything although it states FF is only using 44% of CPU atm all other graphs report CPU usage at 100 dipping to 98 when cursor is not moved.

Ram usage is fine. Only 98mb in total of the 3.5gb

 

X2P can you run HDtune and see what scores you get?

 

HD tune that I had in vista is below



Normal for the HD (lower then usual by slight margin due to tasks running durring test)

 

FF is using 44% - Any addons etc ?? Check this thread

Which process is using the rest of the 44/46% of the CPU ?

 

It doesnt state which process is sucking up the rest of the CPU but that 44% is not due to extentions/addons since I have zero installed.

Also not flash based as I do not have flash installed.

 

When in tskmgr -> processes -> click on the CPU tab to arrange the processes in descending order w.r.t. CPU usage.
That should let you know which processes have the highest CPU usage. (Same for memory utilization)

 

Highest is tskmgr.exe (05) that is for CPU.

For Memory the highest is Firefox at 75-80 000 K

 

Highest is tskmgr (I guess System Idle Process at top). That means your system is idle at the moment. Is the system still lagging/buggy ??
FF memory usage is fine, mine is at 98K

 

Yup it still slow at typing text. I type fast but I have never encountered such bad lag. It is usually 5-10 words behind.

It may be related to the HD thrashing?

 

Oh man, I'll be upgrading to Vista Ultimate 32-bit soon. I hope this doesn't happen to me. And I only have 2GB RAM!

I'll be keeping my eye on this thread.

Is the OS sluggish in safe mode?

 

If the HDD light is continually on, then yes. Also, launch Resource Monitor to monitor all 4 components (CPU, RAM, Network and HDD).

It'll be hard to hear the 5K320, but HDD thrashing - you have already disabled Superfetch and WSearch, so you can try and set a fixed size for the page file (~3-3.5GB), with same initial and max size.
And try running a Disk Cleanup or a total registry and disk cleanup with CCleaner.
Plus, Defrag when you have time.

 

What antivirus/security software are you using?

I think you should list out the software you've installed on your system, this way it will be a lot easier to pinpoint the source of the problem. If you have both SuperFetch and Indexing disabled, then it's very possible that another 3rd party software is causing this.

Maybe you should use HijackThis to create a report of your computer settings, then post it here.

http://www.merijn.org/programs.php
http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/tools/security_tools/hijackthis

 

What power plan are you using? Check the minimum and maximum processor state.

 

Its the same

The page file is set at default for 3gb already in my case >.<. Yes the drive is VERY quite durring use with XP. It was actually silent that even putting my ear where the hard drive is located on the case I had to have a silent enviroment and work hard. That is why I was baffled hearing it in Vista.

Ill give CCleaner a go

I currently have no anti-virus/spyware and am only visiting sites I know are clean. (Gmail, NBR, Meebo, and Black Viper)

I have tried Highjack this and I get a error in the middle of it saying it could not get XXXXXXXX so it will skip etc. But what was caught was normal Vista executables.

Current software installed

Vista Ultimate default + SP1 and few other updates
Firefox 3.1
ASquared
Highjack this
Ccleaner (installing)

Edit (LOADING AVAST ON SYSTEM)

Powerplan: Highperformance

 

Do you have Windows Defender disabled? Does a-squared have a real-time protection too?

Try using Balanced and see if it's still the same?

 

Just turned Defender off by services.msc

Balanced seems to be the same and at times slightly laggier >.<

 

Why don't you reinstall the OS again, but don't even think about messing with the tweaking. It does harm than good if you make mistake. Vista will optimize itself, and your hardware is moer than capable to run the OS. I wonder how much more you are gaining from those tweaks.

 

To completely turn off Windows Defender, there are 3 steps to do in the follow order:

First: Control Panel -> Windows Defender -> Options -> Uncheck the use WD box.

Second: Disabled the WD service like you did.

Third: Open msconfig and uncheck the WD startup application.

I'd also try uninstalling a-squared and see if it makes any difference.

The other things I can think of is try to do Windows Updates and make sure you have the most up-to-date drivers for your devices.

 

All done.

Windows and Drivers were all updated to latest. >.<

One thing I have not mentioned is scrolling is very un smooth, general animations like popups are also unsmooth

 

If you don't have much data on that partition, or if you can backup all the stuff onto another partition, then first delete your user account and let vista create a new one for you. If that doesn't improve anything, do a clean install and install drivers and software step-by-step, eyeing the Resource Monitor side-by-side, and see at what point the lagging commences.

 

Attempted and failed >.<

Also tried clean install like stated by a previous member. I also applied tweaks and now typing is only a few letters behind instead of far behind. But still having high CPU Usage aswell as HD Thrashing is now on and off.

Thanks so far guys!

 

By the way, for the Intel chipset driver, are you using the one from the notebook manufacturer or the latest directly from Intel?

 

On clean install I udated to the latest from intel

Anywho I have now done away with vista. I am currently typing on XP without Video drivers and a couple other drivers and it runs far faster and smoother then vista.