Hard drive busy about 15 to 20 minutes after start up

[Guest]

I just upgrade my Window XP Home Media 2005 to Vista. The system is fast. But
for some reason my hard drive light keeping solid green for about 15 to 20
minutes. It 's seem doing something. Any one know why it's happen? Does it
because Vista runing Indexing when boot up? Can some one help me with that.

System information:
ADM Turion 64 1.6x2
2 GB Memory
120 GB hard dirve

 

[B J W]

I have been running Vista on an upgraded system, since sometime in
December. This morning I started up, and I opened Outlook 2007 and
Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer, after what seemed like a decent
interval to allow full bootup, and the system slowed remarkably. Task
Manager Performance showed the processor running above 60%, but the
processes list did not identify any processes using anything like that,
at worst, all processes together totalled no more than about 25%.
Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer showed "unresponsive".

I have 1 GB of RAM. About 1125 MB of pagefile was being used, which
seems like a lot to me.

After about 5 minutes or so, it all calmed down. Right now, in additon
to Windows Mail, I have Outlook, Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer
open. The page file is under 800 MB, and the processor usage is in
single digits. Go figure.

 

[Dale White]

It's probably a mix of both. Windows Search and Superfetch. I haven't seen
the drive run for 15-20 mins, more around 10 mins. But it's possible.

You can go into services and set superfetch and windows search services to
manula reboot and the HDD activity should end within 2-3 mins.

It's up to you and how important those features are, on whether you want
them running or not.

 

[John Barnett MVP]

I would imagine that it is the indexing (search) service that is keeping the
drive busy. It should start to settle down as everything finally gets
indexed.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
Windows - Shell/User

Web: http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org
Web: http://vistasupport.mvps.org

The information in this mail/post is supplied "as is". No warranty of any
kind, either expressed or implied, is made in relation to the accuracy,
reliability or content of this mail/post. The Author shall not be liable for
any direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the
use of, or inability to use, information or opinions expressed in this
mail/post..

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

FYI: It's possible to see if indexing is keeping the system busy. If you run
TaskManager {elevated} all the indexing happens in the processes
SearchIndexer.exe, SearchFilterHost.exe and SearchProtocolHost.exe.

But in general the indexer tries to "back-off" when the user wants to do
something else with their computer. As soon as mouse moves or keyboards
activity is detected then indexing will slow down to reduce its resource
usage. Even when there's no user activity it runs with low CPU priority and
uses low-pri disk IO so if there are other things running on the system then
their performance should not be significantly affected.

Dave Wood

 

[Rock]

I just upgrade my Window XP Home Media 2005 to Vista. The system is fast.
But
for some reason my hard drive light keeping solid green for about 15 to 20
minutes. It 's seem doing something. Any one know why it's happen? Does it
because Vista runing Indexing when boot up? Can some one help me with
that.

To see what's happening open Reliability and Performance Monitor. From
Start | type Performance and it will pop up at the top. Run it and in the
right pane click on the Disk and CPU sections to see what processes are
running and accessing what files. You'll see how it works hard at first
then slows down.

 

[John Barnett MVP]

Thanks for that information, Dave, it is most useful.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
Windows - Shell/User

Web: http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org
Web: http://vistasupport.mvps.org

The information in this mail/post is supplied "as is". No warranty of any
kind, either expressed or implied, is made in relation to the accuracy,
reliability or content of this mail/post. The Author shall not be liable for
any direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the
use of, or inability to use, information or opinions expressed in this
mail/post..

 

[Guest]

I see this too. For a good 10 minutes after every reboot the hd is taking a
huge hit and just crunching along non stop.

I thought it might be indexing so I shut that off and it didn't make any
difference. Still 10 minutes of slow performance after every boot because of
huge hd activity.

Checked msconfig, I only have the barest minimum checked on the start up tab.

It's starting to really bug.

 

[Dale M. White]

Do you have superfetch turned on ? Though it's not 10 mins it's a good 5
after boot that windows is prefetching files into memory. If when you first
boot, right click on your task bar and choose task manager, then click the
performance tab, then click the resource monitor.

Expand out the disk option and tell it to sort on reads and you'll see what
Vista is doing with all that disk access