Vista disk check

How reliable is the built-in scandisk function for Vista? I tried looking for free alternatives but I'd like to confirm first of all whether the Vista diskcheck is worth using before downloading more software onto my PC.

 

Tune Up Utilities has one as well:

Download Tune-Up

 

Is it any good? My PC has been crashing lately when unzipping large files and playing music files at the same time. I'm worried that the HDD is being overloaded and hope this utility can help me see if all the physical sectors on the HDD are still in good working order.

 

Vista chkdsk works fine, but you really should not need to run it that often. Your system is probably crashing because of something else. Chkdsk would not find problems related to an "overloaded" disk. Please define "crashing".

 

Crash: Sound card freezes and plays a horrid noise. System completely unresponsive. Happens when I accidentally run a spyware check when one partition is busy downloading or when unzipping a big RAR file from said partition when music is played in Winamp (music files in different partition from zipped data).

Orev: You told me this before, never do things like a spyware check and an antivirus check at the same time. This time I was unlucky with the spyware button and plain clueless on how the unzipping process crashed my PC.

 

The system appears to freeze because it has too many disk requests going on at the same time. Unzipping does a lot of reading and writing to the disk, as does a spyware scan. The music freezes because it cannot read from the disk to get more data because the disk is so busy doing other stuff. The hard drive light is probably on constantly while this is happening.

Unfortunately the disk is the slowest thing in any computer, and you need to manage it better with stuff like this. You can only do 1 disk intensive thing at a time, such as unzipping, spyware scanning, AV scanning, etc... A good way to tell if something is disk intensive is to watch the hard disk light. If it stays on all the time or most of the time, then you shouldn't try to do something else.

Also, your system is not crashing. It's not responsive because it is very busy. If at this point you turn off the power because you think it has frozen, you could corrupt the disk. At that point you should run a chkdsk, and for the C: drive and you might need to reboot and let it run on boot.

The way to tell if the system has completely frozen is to move the mouse. If it does not move on the screen, then it is truly frozen and the only solution is to reset it.

 

I would disagree that the system is not crashing. Sound card freeze and screech, followed by unresponsive system would indicate a poorly written sound driver crashing the system.

If you haven't updated this yet, do so. If you have does Vista allow you to turn down hardware acceleration for sound like XP did? If so, do so.

Also, repeated crashes will corrupt your file system, so a good old chkdsk won't hurt....

 

Mouse completely frozen. Unlike the last time when I did two disk-intensive tasks this time the PC didn't right itself. Hopefully I won't have the same problems in future, just have to remember to turn off Winamp when unzipping big files.

Any one have the latest driver for the "Sigmatel High Definition Audio Codec" for Vista x86. That's been bothering me for a while since Dell's support site doesn't have it and my driver dates back to July of this year. Can't seem to find a place to download it off the web for free either. I have a feeling updating that driver as well wouldn't hurt.

 

Yes, that's a good thought about the sound driver, not something I had considered. Maybe it gets into an mp3 streaming mode of some type and always expects to have data available.