M
Mark.Wright
Hi all,
I have just installed win xp pro on a laptop, and find that battery life
is being compromised because the hdd never goes into standby mode. This is
because there is clockwork-regular disk access evey second. Inspecting
filemon and teskmanager I see that this is due to lsass.exe performing 3
writes and 3 reads every second. I have been into msconfig and unchecked
every item, and removed everything from startup, so that I boot into a
totally clean system with absolutely nothing running - no AV, no Norton,
no nothing. Still lsass.exe is busy spewing I/O to the disk. Searches on
Google groups indicate that this is quite a common problem, but I have
never seen a solution that worked be posted. Many times people have
posted articles or advice about trojans, AV software etc, but they never
got to the problem. It has been noted that MS claim this behaviour is
"normal" - which it most obviously isnt at all. Noone (not even MS!) would
write an OS that needed 3 physical disk writes a second. If they were
stupid enough to, there would have been no point in ever spending the time
to program idle-disk power-down ability into the OS, since the disk would
never be idle.
This inspired me to check my desktop, a dual CPU win xp pro, and I see
that while activity by lsass.exe is identical, there is absolutely no disk
access during periods of total idleness. I then checked a friend's xp pro
install, and his has no such constant access by lsass.exe.
This leads me to belive there are two issues:
1. A scenario that causes lsass.exe on an idle machine with nothing else
to have constant I/O.
2. A scenario that causes a busy lsass.exe in scenario 1 to always
perform a physical write, rather than some kind of cache/memory I/O write.
Since this is reducing the useability of a laptop (battery life), I do
consider this a serious flaw in XP. Can anyone shed any light on the above
scenarios?
Cheers,
Mark
--
I have just installed win xp pro on a laptop, and find that battery life
is being compromised because the hdd never goes into standby mode. This is
because there is clockwork-regular disk access evey second. Inspecting
filemon and teskmanager I see that this is due to lsass.exe performing 3
writes and 3 reads every second. I have been into msconfig and unchecked
every item, and removed everything from startup, so that I boot into a
totally clean system with absolutely nothing running - no AV, no Norton,
no nothing. Still lsass.exe is busy spewing I/O to the disk. Searches on
Google groups indicate that this is quite a common problem, but I have
never seen a solution that worked be posted. Many times people have
posted articles or advice about trojans, AV software etc, but they never
got to the problem. It has been noted that MS claim this behaviour is
"normal" - which it most obviously isnt at all. Noone (not even MS!) would
write an OS that needed 3 physical disk writes a second. If they were
stupid enough to, there would have been no point in ever spending the time
to program idle-disk power-down ability into the OS, since the disk would
never be idle.
This inspired me to check my desktop, a dual CPU win xp pro, and I see
that while activity by lsass.exe is identical, there is absolutely no disk
access during periods of total idleness. I then checked a friend's xp pro
install, and his has no such constant access by lsass.exe.
This leads me to belive there are two issues:
1. A scenario that causes lsass.exe on an idle machine with nothing else
to have constant I/O.
2. A scenario that causes a busy lsass.exe in scenario 1 to always
perform a physical write, rather than some kind of cache/memory I/O write.
Since this is reducing the useability of a laptop (battery life), I do
consider this a serious flaw in XP. Can anyone shed any light on the above
scenarios?
Cheers,
Mark
--