| Subject: Heavy drive activity followed by application not responding. |
| Group: microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance |
| Date: 9/3/2008 11:13:32 PM |
| From: md [Email Address Protection] |
Wondering if anyone can offer some troubleshooting tips. Periodically, a Windows Home Premium PC will engage in heavy drive activity, usually accessing the page file, thumbcache, searchindexer or a windows media 360 file ( forget the file name). When this drive activity occurs and an application is closed (usually IE, Windows Explorer), the application will hang briefly and often times stop responding. So far I've tried: 1. Defrag -a command. Volume is 0% fragmented. 2. SFC / SCANNOW -- everything checked out. 3. A checkdisk on startup. Everything was OK. Crashes have lowered the System Stability Chart to a 5.7 reading -- and falling. Any Windows experts able to suggest some other things to try out? Thanks! |
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| Subject: Re: Heavy drive activity followed by application not responding. |
| Group: microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance |
| Date: 9/4/2008 3:56:39 PM |
| From: "John Marshall" [Email Address Protection] |
I have similar problems with a Dell Inspiron 1525, Vista Home Premium SP1 system. Under any application I use my hard drive seems to freeze up and takes about 5 minutes to free itself. This happens multiple times a day at random. All activity on the system stops and I can do nothing but wait. No mouse control either. I am running McAfee Security Center 8.1 and am current on all updates. Would like some help in finding a resolution as this is highly frustrating. Thanks in advance. -- John John Marshall Cell:(707)-364-3539 mail4marshall@gmail.com "md" <mdkrantz@gmail.com> wrote in message news:a290f20e-d2b5-4457-abbb-8ed10186d580@t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com... > Wondering if anyone can offer some troubleshooting tips. > > Periodically, a Windows Home Premium PC will engage in heavy drive > activity, usually accessing the page file, thumbcache, searchindexer > or a windows media 360 file ( forget the file name). When this drive > activity occurs and an application is closed (usually IE, Windows > Explorer), the application will hang briefly and often times stop > responding. > > So far I've tried: > > 1. Defrag -a command. Volume is 0% fragmented. > 2. SFC / SCANNOW -- everything checked out. > 3. A checkdisk on startup. Everything was OK. > > Crashes have lowered the System Stability Chart to a 5.7 reading -- > and falling. > > Any Windows experts able to suggest some other things to try out? > Thanks! |
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| Subject: Re: Heavy drive activity followed by application not responding. |
| Group: microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance |
| Date: 9/5/2008 10:12:45 AM |
| From: md [Email Address Protection] |
Interesting that you're having the issue, too. With some unscientific research, this issue appears to be more frequent on Dell PCs, but I've read users of other brands having it too. Not sure how widespread it is, since my HP laptop runs great on Vista and has never experienced this issue. How much RAM do you have? I installed an additional 2GB this week, for a total of 4GB, and Vista appears to be able to use a total of 3GB. That seems to help, slightly. Was aware Vista wouldn't use all 4GB, but thought the available number would be closer to 3.5GB. Wonder if this is part of the issue? Also, what type of hard drive controller to you have? I'm completely guessing, but I also wonder if the issue has something to do with Vista's SuperFetch feature. This link provides some information on how SuperFetch works: http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html Does anyone know adding a second page file on my second internal drive (which doesn't contain the OS) might help? |
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| Subject: Re: Heavy drive activity followed by application not responding. |
| Group: microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance |
| Date: 9/8/2008 10:52:56 AM |
| From: md [Email Address Protection] |
Did some tinkering, and have been able to reduce the "not responding" issue a bit. Did all the following things at around the same time, so unable to isolate what actually helped. Some of the things I've tried: 1. Added 2GB of RAM. Takes system to 4GB (although 32-bit OS cannot take full advantage of all 4). 2. Switched to ATI video card with more RAM than previous nVidia 7300LE card. Important: Uninstalled the Nvidia drivers. Errors still occured until the Nvidia drivers were uninstalled using the Programs option in control panel. 3. Removed Adobe 7.0 startup item using Windows Defender. System has Acrobat 9.0, so not sure why Adobe 7.0 was even in the computer much less loading itself automatically. 4. Removed a "filter" called AC3Filter. Used these steps: A. Find ac3filter.ax file. B. Start the command prompt as an administrator. This is important since step C may fail if you don't. Right click on cmd and run as administrator (in Vista). C. Unregister this module from command line: regsvr32 /u x: \some_dir \ac3filter.ax D. Delete registry key HKCU\Software\AC3Filter E. Reboot the computer (you may not be able to do step F unless you reboot first). F. Find and delete files ac3filter.ax and ac3filter.cpl if it is on your PC |
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