Reduce vista disk activity

The only gotcha involved is that Microsoft has, with good reason, obfuscated the process from the untrained eye. Naturally I will give this warning. Although this method is tested and proven, that is not an absolute guarantee. Data can get lost when strange things occur. So with that in mind, your data is in your hands and you might want to do a data backup first.

Microsoft hasn't placed the act of resizing a partition under a glaring spotlight for a reason. If the average user were to get their fingers on these tools, they could do some real, and irreversible, damage. Fortunately, you are not the average user. To do this, it must churn through the hard disk searching and indexing each and every last file. Vista periodically rebuilds this index, causing further drive thrashing. There are a couple of ways to reduce the disk overhead that the indexing feature imposes.

The obvious and more drastic method is just to turn drive indexing off. In Windows XP, this was almost an automatic step when tweaking the operating system, since the indexing feature was next to useless anyway. With Windows Vista's enhanced search features, you may want to think twice about this if you have, or expect to have a large amount of data in terms of number of files stored on your computer.

Indexing does make searching for files and folders quite a bit faster, but searches do still work with the same results without indexing. They may just take longer. To turn the indexing feature off in Windows Vista, open the 'start' menu and type 'services' in the search bar.

In the services window, scroll down until you reach the 'windows search' service. Right click it and hit 'properties'.

Suspecting some sort of dumb prefetching to be the problem, I launched it with no "prefetch" parameter, but found it made no difference. It may be said that Windows Media Player's constant disk writing, whatever it's supposed to be for, is harmless because it's only around KB per minute, which is a very small burden on the disk. But six months ago I was noticing a greater burden or more exactly annoying audible disk grinding about once a minute clearly attributable to Windows Media Player.

I disabled loads of stuff in Vista around that time. When multiple independent processes use the disk around the same time, there's more noise as the disk head is repositioned.

Another near constant disk writing activity in Vista is associated with the two small files lastalive0. Unfortunately, Vista is still producing stuff I don't want that I can't disable because Vista hasn't been well designed enough, and because the documentation is too poor. I'm seriously thinking of switching to Linux. Abdel Later Masnavi , Jun 2, Don't do any of this stuff. You are telling people to disable huge parts of the system, many of which are the reason Vista exists.

You are also telling people to disable services that give critical safety in the event of a problem, all for what? Hard drives these days are almost silent already. Good god don't disable all of those!

SuperFetch may cause a lot of hard disk grinding but turning it off will noticeably cripple system performance. Since disabling all of them, my system runs just as well as my XP systems, and I'm finally satisfied running Vista. This is JMO. Just Lou , Jun 3, Ahhh yes, another newbie tweaker, who knows more about operating systems than the folks who make their living writing them. Good luck gettting ANY updates after you do. Yep, Superfetch and Windows search are just useless, turn em off.

Then wonder why the hell applications take longer to load and why you can't find a document you created last year that mentioned XYZ in it. Yep, great suggestions. Oh, of course jettison Windows Defender, hell why not turn off your firewall and antivirus while your at it. Great article - saved me som gig's too. Maybe you know about this problem then, because I haven't had any luck googling it or asking about in MS's newsgroups: Due to company policy, my "Documents" folder gets relocated to a folder on our SBS server.

As far as I can tell, my only option if want to include these files in my Vista search index is to make these files offline accessible. My problem is, that my main drive is a fairly small 70Gig Regards Jesper Hauge. Oddly enough, my disk space usage went up after the Disk Cleanup phase by. But the 82 GB I got from the rest more than made up for it. October 22, Alexis Machine. Has multiple graph views including a tree map , generates all kinds of interesting reports largest, oldest, temp, and duplicate files just to start.

WinDirStat is free, and free is always nice. My ultimate tool for cleaning up my hds is sequoiaview. It creates a visual representation of all files on your harddisc. It makes it super easy to trace large files. I prefer just three power states: sleeping, on or hibernate. Why would you ever use off? October 23, Turning off Hibernate on desktop machines is a great option. However - note to the Windows team - we can do without the "Hibernate is disabled on this machine" alert bubble on every boot.

We like Hibernate off - I know it's your pet feature but it really doesn't matter to us as much as it does to you - stop pestering us about it! Peter H. October 24, Try the freeware Revo Uninstaller. That little jewel really cleans the disk and registry when removing programs.

October 26, October 27, Because of it's virtualization features, you don't need any special tricks or tools to relocate most of your user data to a separate drive.

You can move them pretty much anywhere you want, as often as you want. There are quite a few how-to's online covering this topic. There are also third-party tools that enable you to accomplish a similar feat under XP. However, there is no built-in support for virtualizing the AppData folder, so using Junction Points is likely the simplest technique for that.

October 29, Wade Dorrell. November 01, November 02, Scott begins "I've got a smallish