Hard drive thrashing - Windows XP Home

[Gas Bag]

I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.
I recently followed these instructions:

http://bucarotechelp.com/computers/windowsts/95021801.asp

But still this problem of thrashing continues. It's got so bad my
system freezes (or comes very close to it). Please help!

 

[Franco Leuzzi [MVP]]

"Gas Bag" ha scritto nel messaggio

I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.
I recently followed these instructions:

http://bucarotechelp.com/computers/windowsts/95021801.asp

But still this problem of thrashing continues. It's got so bad my
system freezes (or comes very close to it). Please help!

Sorry.
This is an Italian NG.
Best regards.

--
Franco Leuzzi
Microsoft ® MVP
Windows Desktop Experience
(e-mail address removed)
http://blogs.dotnethell.it/franco/

 

[Olórin]

"Gas Bag" ha scritto nel messaggio


Sorry.
This is an Italian NG.
Best regards.

--
Franco Leuzzi
Microsoft ® MVP
Windows Desktop Experience
(e-mail address removed)
http://blogs.dotnethell.it/franco/

Only the Italian one out of those to which you and the OP cross-posted is,
though...

 

[Steve Hayes]

I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.

I had a similar problem, using Firefox. I frequently had to switch the power
off to stop it.

I took the cause of the problem to be the automatic updates of programs,
including the browser, which consumed more and more resources until the
machine was doing nothing but swapping stuff to disk.

The machine was stolen a couple of weeks ago (I was thinking of replacing it
anyway) and the new one has Windows 7, which boots in 1 minute instead of 25
minutes, and shuts down in 1 minute instead of 7 minutes, so there's an
improvement. It also has 2 Gigs of memory instead of 250 Mb.

 

[Bill Baka]

I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.
I recently followed these instructions:

http://bucarotechelp.com/computers/windowsts/95021801.asp

But still this problem of thrashing continues. It's got so bad my
system freezes (or comes very close to it). Please help!

It sounds like disk doctor program is in order to defrag you system.
There is actually a defrag built into Windows 7 but I haven't used it yet.

 

[Swifty]

I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB.

Note that when you defragment two partitions on a single drive, you
may actually make matters worse. Defragmentation usually works by
moving the files as close together as possible, and usually as close
to location zero within the partition as possible. So your data ends
up in two "bands", and each time you reference the other partition,
you have to cross the gap between the bands.

The answer to this is to defragment the lower-placed partition towards
the upper end of its range, and the higher placed partition towards
the lower end of its range. I believe that jkdefrag can do this, but
you might have to force the issue by requesting a gap at the bottom of
the lowest partition.

If you do things this way, then your data ends up on one band, which
spans the divide between your partition.

However, in most cases the problem is insufficient RAM, which causes
swapping. That can really hammer your disk. Your Process Explorer can
tell you if this is happening a lot - look at column "Page Fault
Delta" (which you'll have to add - it is not in the default columns
displayed)