Disk thrashing on boot up

[Russ]

What on earth is WinXP pro doing on boot up that makes my hard drive
run so hard on boot up? On this PII 333 laptop with 320 mb of ram,
and a freshly de-fragged hard drive with 894 mb free on the C
partition, it thrashed around for a full 1 minute and 50 seconds after
the "Microsoft Sound" during boot.

I've got a similar situation on my PIII desktop with 384 mb of ram and
a new installation. Both machines have all of the Windows updates
installed from MS's site.

I've checked the Task Manager to try and see what's going on, but all
I usually see is a reading in the mid 90's in the System Idle Process
which is still there when the machine is silent.

Anyone know how to improve on this situation?

Russ

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Windows XP's Built-In Optimization
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1149277,00.asp

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User

Be Smart! Protect your PC!
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


| What on earth is WinXP pro doing on boot up that makes my hard drive
| run so hard on boot up? On this PII 333 laptop with 320 mb of ram,
| and a freshly de-fragged hard drive with 894 mb free on the C
| partition, it thrashed around for a full 1 minute and 50 seconds after
| the "Microsoft Sound" during boot.
|
| I've got a similar situation on my PIII desktop with 384 mb of ram and
| a new installation. Both machines have all of the Windows updates
| installed from MS's site.
|
| I've checked the Task Manager to try and see what's going on, but all
| I usually see is a reading in the mid 90's in the System Idle Process
| which is still there when the machine is silent.
|
| Anyone know how to improve on this situation?
|
| Russ

 

[~A_Sammy]

I had a similar thing happen and removing the msn messenger thing made it go
away. I have no idea why. Not the messenger service that defaults to
enable in the services list, the instant messaging one.

It's a good idea to turn of the msg service, too if you don't need it
because spammers loaded me with pop ups when I had it enabled.

 

[Mike Brearley]

~A_Sammy,
Telling people to turn off the messenger service is a bad idea. You were
being bombarded with messenger service spam because your system's netbios
ports are wide open to the internet. Shutting down the messenger service is
like takeing the battery out of the fire alarm when it's trying to warn you
of a fire. You'd be better off (and safer) by either turning on Windows
XP's built-in firewall (search for firewall in the help and support) or
getting a third party firewall.

Russ,
I see Carey gave her usual insightful link reply (how do people like that
become MVPs anyway?) Your computer is loading a ton of services and device
drivers at start-up. With a PII 333, you're going to notice a prolonged
period of hard disk activity as it's going to take longer to start all these
processes and drivers on such a slow machine. Heck, I have a 1Ghz laptop
and it takes that long before the disk activity slows down. I don't hear
it, but I see the light on solid for at least 30 seconds after logging in
then flashing quite a bit for another 30...

--
Posted 'as is'. If there are any spelling and/or grammar mistakes, they
were a direct result of my fingers and brain not being synchronized or my
lack of caffeine.

Mike Brearley (mike_brearley at hotmail dot com)