Hard Disk activity at Start Up of Vista (on ACER PC)

[Frans Mulder]

Hallo,

I noticed that my PC has a lot of Hard Disk activity in the first 20 minutes after start up.
What is happening and how can it be disabled?

Negative result of this activity:
Hard disks are warming up the interior of the PC.
Then the cooling fans start to make a lot of noise.
After about 20 minutes the HD activity stops, but the heat build up causes the fans to make a lot of noise during the rest of the session.

After the PC wakes up from the sleep mode this HD activity does not take place and my PC has a comfortable noise level all the time even at heavy load like e.g. Microsofts FSX.

My PC is an ACER Aspire E571-ME7Q with an Intel E6400 dual core processor and two 250 GB Harddisks and a Nvidea 8800GTS graphics Card.

Thanks

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

Bring up Task Manager, click on the Performance tab, and then click Resource Monitor. If you expand the disk section you'll be able to see what it is, or at least narrow it down somewhat. The two primary culprits are indexing (which will be identified specifically in the above area) and Superfetch precaching, which is most likely what it is. Superfetch commonly will work after boot and will operate upon (read) numerous files (even huge ones) you've recently accessed, which will be listed in Resource Monitor as well. As a test, you could always disable Superfetch in Services. The odds are very good that the problem will not recur. Unfortunately, you can't configure Superfetch (say, to tell it to ignore your data drive), it's either on or off.
Hallo,

I noticed that my PC has a lot of Hard Disk activity in the first 20 minutes after start up.
What is happening and how can it be disabled?

Negative result of this activity:
Hard disks are warming up the interior of the PC.
Then the cooling fans start to make a lot of noise.
After about 20 minutes the HD activity stops, but the heat build up causes the fans to make a lot of noise during the rest of the session.

After the PC wakes up from the sleep mode this HD activity does not take place and my PC has a comfortable noise level all the time even at heavy load like e.g. Microsofts FSX.

My PC is an ACER Aspire E571-ME7Q with an Intel E6400 dual core processor and two 250 GB Harddisks and a Nvidea 8800GTS graphics Card.

Thanks

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

In addition to what Milhouse mentioned, if your PC came with Vista, chances
are it came with a lot of junkware too. Uninstall what you can, then use
Microsoft's Autoruns.zip to see what starts up with your PC. Chances are you
can get a pretty good boost if you start turning things off. If your have
the sidebar, and a slideshow, that can take a fair amount of CPU cycles too.
Also take a look at TweakVI for some interesting tweaks.

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

Hallo,

I noticed that my PC has a lot of Hard Disk activity in the first 20 minutes
after start up.
What is happening and how can it be disabled?

Negative result of this activity:
Hard disks are warming up the interior of the PC.
Then the cooling fans start to make a lot of noise.
After about 20 minutes the HD activity stops, but the heat build up causes
the fans to make a lot of noise during the rest of the session.

After the PC wakes up from the sleep mode this HD activity does not take
place and my PC has a comfortable noise level all the time even at heavy
load like e.g. Microsofts FSX.

My PC is an ACER Aspire E571-ME7Q with an Intel E6400 dual core processor
and two 250 GB Harddisks and a Nvidea 8800GTS graphics Card.

Thanks