HDD Thrashing With Svchost.exe and Superfetch....

[Sithtiger]

I've had my Vista x64 install going for about two months now and everything was fine up until last night. The last two programs I installed were Office XP and GRAW 2 SP Demo. I've uninstalled both programs too, but I'm still having the same problem. Right after I boot into Vista, the HDD starts thrashing. I opened up Process Monitor and it shows Svchost.exe scanning all my hard drives and only then is when it stops. It seems like when I stop the Superfetch service, it doesn't do this, but I don't want to disable Superfetch since it's very good at optimizing Vista. This just started last night, so it's got to be something I installed....the only programs I can think of have already been uninstalled....what gives? The HDD thrashing stops after a few minutes, but this is a big deal because it goes through and scans all my drives. As time goes on, this will only take longer and longer so this needs to stop now. I just don't know what could have caused it. Is there something in Office XP that would cause something in Vista to do this? I don't see how since Vista is much newer than Office XP is. Also, I've uninstalled Office XP, so I don't get it. Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[BD2003]

Its a good thing. Its not "scanning your drives", its preloading your most frequently used files into memory. Obviously it has to thrash your HDD in order to do so when you first start up, but its absolutely normal.

 

[Noema]

My Vista x64 thrashes the HDD very heavily for the first minute or so after booting (obviously loading the Superfetch cache onto memory and flash drive) but even then it's fine because it's low priority I/O and it doesn't really affect computer usage.

 

[masteraleph]

How much stuff did you have loaded previously?

Keep in mind that Vista will use superfetch to preload recently used (and later into your ownership, regularly used) programs. Give it a few minutes to thrash and load those programs, keeping in mind that since you have 4GB of RAM it may easily decide to use 2GB or more for preloading and needs to load 2GB or more from your HDD into RAM.

 

[dds14u]

In case you really do think it's a bug, Vista's recovery system has actually been quite successful for me. It's an alternative.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: masteraleph
How much stuff did you have loaded previously?

Keep in mind that Vista will use superfetch to preload recently used (and later into your ownership, regularly used) programs. Give it a few minutes to thrash and load those programs, keeping in mind that since you have 4GB of RAM it may easily decide to use 2GB or more for preloading and needs to load 2GB or more from your HDD into RAM.

It will completely fill your RAM AFAIK. If you have 16GB of RAM (dont we all wish), it will preload 15.5GB. If you have 4gb RAM, it is going to preload about 3.5gb of data. Considering its also doing it from random places on your drive, its going to take a while to do that.

But as others have said, its a low priority I/O thread (new in Vista), and it won't affect performance as much as the thrashing sounds like it would. In other words, you don't have to wait for it to finish thrashing. Just get on with doing what you're doing. Vista does a lot of things that thrash your HD at strange times (defrag, indexing, precaching), all on low priority threads. I know we've been trained since the earliest of windows days that in general, disk thrashing is bad, but its time to let that go.

It is most definitely not a bug. It's a feature, and it's a very good thing. Free memory = Wasted memory.

It's also time to let go of shutting down at night. You shouldnt reboot unless youre forced to because of an update or application install. Just put Vista into sleep mode. Your comp in S3 mode consumes about 4W of power...thats nothing. If you want to completely shut it off, just use hibernate.

This way, when you come out of sleep (which will take a matter of seconds if not less), everything is already preloaded.

 

[thegorx]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: masteraleph
How much stuff did you have loaded previously?

Keep in mind that Vista will use superfetch to preload recently used (and later into your ownership, regularly used) programs. Give it a few minutes to thrash and load those programs, keeping in mind that since you have 4GB of RAM it may easily decide to use 2GB or more for preloading and needs to load 2GB or more from your HDD into RAM.

It will completely fill your RAM AFAIK. If you have 16GB of RAM (dont we all wish), it will preload 15.5GB. If you have 4gb RAM, it is going to preload about 3.5gb of data. Considering its also doing it from random places on your drive, its going to take a while to do that.

But as others have said, its a low priority I/O thread (new in Vista), and it won't affect performance as much as the thrashing sounds like it would. In other words, you don't have to wait for it to finish thrashing. Just get on with doing what you're doing. Vista does a lot of things that thrash your HD at strange times (defrag, indexing, precaching), all on low priority threads. I know we've been trained since the earliest of windows days that in general, disk thrashing is bad, but its time to let that go.

It is most definitely not a bug. It's a feature, and it's a very good thing. Free memory = Wasted memory.

It's also time to let go of shutting down at night. You shouldnt reboot unless youre forced to because of an update or application install. Just put Vista into sleep mode. Your comp in S3 mode consumes about 4W of power...thats nothing. If you want to completely shut it off, just use hibernate.

This way, when you come out of sleep (which will take a matter of seconds if not less), everything is already preloaded.

Only time will tell if these are facts, personally, I won't let go of the idea of shutting down my personal computer anytime soon. But how do you know that all of this is working correctly on a system and what were to happen if Windows gets messes up and the system doesn't wake up or worst the fans don't or file system or registry hive gets corrupt.
I think all this is wishful thinking at best, maybe if Windows had a track record of working flawlessly it would be different but the fact that it doesn't and the fact that Vista is new and new versions of Windows always seem to have bugs would make any reasonable person think twice.

 

[thegorx]

Originally posted by: Sithtiger
I've had my Vista x64 install going for about two months now and everything was fine up until last night. The last two programs I installed were Office XP and GRAW 2 SP Demo. I've uninstalled both programs too, but I'm still having the same problem. Right after I boot into Vista, the HDD starts thrashing. I opened up Process Monitor and it shows Svchost.exe scanning all my hard drives and only then is when it stops. It seems like when I stop the Superfetch service, it doesn't do this, but I don't want to disable Superfetch since it's very good at optimizing Vista. This just started last night, so it's got to be something I installed....the only programs I can think of have already been uninstalled....what gives? The HDD thrashing stops after a few minutes, but this is a big deal because it goes through and scans all my drives. As time goes on, this will only take longer and longer so this needs to stop now. I just don't know what could have caused it. Is there something in Office XP that would cause something in Vista to do this? I don't see how since Vista is much newer than Office XP is. Also, I've uninstalled Office XP, so I don't get it. Thanks in advance for the help!

Maybe now that you've uninstalled the programs you should restore registry hives from before they were installed to make sure all the settings are back to where they were for sure. Or you could use system restore if you don't want to just restore the registry manually

one thought out from left field is in the past windows would sometimes spend lots of time looking for something that is no longer there.

 

[Sithtiger]

Thanks guys....that's what I started thinking, but I don't understand why I didn't notice all this beforehand...that is the Superfetch doing this the whole time. Just because I'm very anal about things, I might just format and reinstall just to satisfy myself.

Altogether I can think of 3 things that I've installed in the past 3 days. Office XP, GRAW 2 SP Demo and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I just don't recall it taking around 5 minutes or so to do all of this. While looking at the Resource Monitor, I noticed that the specific Svchost.exe that was being used said this Svchost.exe (LocalServiceNetworkRestricted). I don't know why Superfetch would have anything to do with the Network, but apparently it does.

 

[Sithtiger]

Well, I went ahead and formatted and reinstalled. It still does it, but so far it seems to be getting faster each time I boot. I'm booting allot since I'm reinstalling my software. I found someone who said this happened to him and even after he uninstalled Office XP from Vista, Superfetch still seemed to be taking the same amount of time each time he booted. He evidently found the answer at the MS Knowledge Base. I looked but couldn't find anything. Anyway, he said he even though it was uninstalled, some COM and DLL files from Office was still screwing with Superfetch. He had to unregister them manually.

I guess I'll stick to OpenOffice. It's free, takes fewer resources and most of all, it doesn't give me problems!

 

[Nothinman]

Only time will tell if these are facts,

Everything but the 4W in S3 should be accurate and that only might not be accurate because different hardware will draw different amounts of power.

I won't let go of the idea of shutting down my personal computer anytime soon.

Which is absolutely retarded, shutting down at night serves no purpose other than saving power so you might as well use sleep or hibernate instead and save yourself some time.

But how do you know that all of this is working correctly on a system and what were to happen if Windows gets messes up and the system doesn't wake up or worst the fans don't or file system or registry hive gets corrupt.

If the system doesn't wake up or you get filesystem/registry corruption then you need to figure out which driver is broken, just like when any other part of the system isn't functioning properly. Same goes with the fans although if they don't come on that's probably an ACPI bug. But you're more likely to have them not shut off at all.

I don't know why Superfetch would have anything to do with the Network, but apparently it does.

It doesn't, it was likely just running as a thread in a svchost instance with something else that did.

 

[Sithtiger]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Only time will tell if these are facts,

Everything but the 4W in S3 should be accurate and that only might not be accurate because different hardware will draw different amounts of power.

I won't let go of the idea of shutting down my personal computer anytime soon.

Which is absolutely retarded, shutting down at night serves no purpose other than saving power so you might as well use sleep or hibernate instead and save yourself some time.

But how do you know that all of this is working correctly on a system and what were to happen if Windows gets messes up and the system doesn't wake up or worst the fans don't or file system or registry hive gets corrupt.

If the system doesn't wake up or you get filesystem/registry corruption then you need to figure out which driver is broken, just like when any other part of the system isn't functioning properly. Same goes with the fans although if they don't come on that's probably an ACPI bug. But you're more likely to have them not shut off at all.

I don't know why Superfetch would have anything to do with the Network, but apparently it does.

It doesn't, it was likely just running as a thread in a svchost instance with something else that did.

You do know that you've mixed up quotes from thegorx and myself right.....it's a little confusing. As far as what I've said though, Superfetch or more accurately svchost always seems to be connected to the Network when Superfetch is doing it's thing. They are connected in some way....that's for sure.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Sithtiger
Thanks guys....that's what I started thinking, but I don't understand why I didn't notice all this beforehand...that is the Superfetch doing this the whole time. Just because I'm very anal about things, I might just format and reinstall just to satisfy myself.

Altogether I can think of 3 things that I've installed in the past 3 days. Office XP, GRAW 2 SP Demo and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I just don't recall it taking around 5 minutes or so to do all of this. While looking at the Resource Monitor, I noticed that the specific Svchost.exe that was being used said this Svchost.exe (LocalServiceNetworkRestricted). I don't know why Superfetch would have anything to do with the Network, but apparently it does.

It doesnt matter what you've installed - superfetch is working with all the data on all your hard drives. It is going to load the most frequently used clusters (also dependent on time of day).

If you havent installed ANYTHING, it'll mostly be preloading dlls and other related files.
If you install something, youre likely to use it, and your use of it will lead superfetch to cache it.

But no matter what, it's going to fill up your memory the best way it can. It isnt always perfect, but it does a pretty good job, and its still in general a good thing. The cache can be dumped immediately to make room for whatever you want to load into memory - its a win/win situation, if you can get over the fact that your disk will be thrashing.

If you want to monitor what its actually loading, you can run process monitor on startup, and set it to only view i/o operations. It'll go blindingly fast, but you can get a general idea of whats loading.

On my comp, I can see a few particular things it goes for - MS office files, files from the games I've been playing, itunes and related files, even some browser cache (probably AT files ) - basically, the things I use most often.

Superfetch has nothing to do with the network...don't read into that too much.

Well, I went ahead and formatted and reinstalled. It still does it, but so far it seems to be getting faster each time I boot. I'm booting allot since I'm reinstalling my software. I found someone who said this happened to him and even after he uninstalled Office XP from Vista, Superfetch still seemed to be taking the same amount of time each time he booted. He evidently found the answer at the MS Knowledge Base. I looked but couldn't find anything. Anyway, he said he even though it was uninstalled, some COM and DLL files from Office was still screwing with Superfetch. He had to unregister them manually.

But yeah, by reinstalling, you've basically just undone all of the optimization and indexing that you can had to go through with the few initial boots. And again, superfetch should take the same amount of time each boot - because you have the same amount of RAM. Its going to fill it all. Perhaps office didnt completely get rid of every DLL (what program ever does), so those files were still considered frequently used by superfetch and it preloaded them. Unregistering isnt going to change that - its only concerned with whether the actual file still exists. Over time, if those files are no longer used, they will no longer be preloaded. Just let it do its thing - you cant control it, but having it on is pretty much in every case better than having it off. At absolute worst, it may not help you, but it should never hurt you. Seriously - get over the disk thrashing...its normal! While this thrashing is going on, go into task manager performance tab and look at the "cached" entry...it will continue to rise until the thrashing stops and "free" memory is single digit.

I guess I'll stick to OpenOffice. It's free, takes fewer resources and most of all, it doesn't give me problems!

I've never seen a version of openoffice that uses less resources/memory than a version of office. It may use less HD space, but it most definitely uses a LOT more memory than office.

 

[BD2003]

Only time will tell if these are facts, personally, I won't let go of the idea of shutting down my personal computer anytime soon.

Well then, youre just wasting your own time. Ever since Win2000, you could leave a system running 24/7 and it the OS itself should stay stable for an indefinite period of time.

But how do you know that all of this is working correctly on a system and what were to happen if Windows gets messes up and the system doesn't wake up or worst the fans don't or file system or registry hive gets corrupt.

If it works, it works. Some components can screw this up. I've never seen fans not wake up. And I've NEVER had problems rebooting a system after a failed suspend - I assume its backing up the registry just in case, but if there was a problem the registry, booting the "last known configuration" or system restore will fix it. If S3 sleep doesnt work as well as you'd like, use hibernate - the computer shuts off COMPLETELY, and just reloads from the HD.

I think all this is wishful thinking at best, maybe if Windows had a track record of working flawlessly it would be different but the fact that it doesn't and the fact that Vista is new and new versions of Windows always seem to have bugs would make any reasonable person think twice.

Well, some components work better than others - I cant get my main PC to reliably wake from sleep due to the X-fi, so I just leave it on 24/7 until they release drivers that fix it. My HTPC on the other hand, has been running for weeks without a reboot, and I must have suspended/woke it at least 100 times without fail during that time.

Just try it. If it works, good. If it doesnt, then it doesnt - but its not going to break anything. Especially Vistas hybrid sleep - it goes into S3 while at the same time it saves to the HD - that way if power cuts, not a problem.

Everything but the 4W in S3 should be accurate and that only might not be accurate because different hardware will draw different amounts of power.

Well, of course it would depend on the system, but AFAIK S3 state powers only the RAM and the bare minimum needed to power peripherals to wake it up. 4W is a number I once heard quoted, but whatever your actual power draw is, it'll be much less than S1(~50W AFAIK), and FAR less than just leaving your PC idle all night (100W+). I'm willing to spend a fraction of a cent of power per night to have my PC wake up in the morning in 2 seconds.

 

[Nothinman]

You do know that you've mixed up quotes from thegorx and myself right.....it's a little confusing.

I didn't mix them up, I just didn't credit who said which part.

As far as what I've said though, Superfetch or more accurately svchost always seems to be connected to the Network when Superfetch is doing it's thing. They are connected in some way....that's for sure.

That's extremely unlikely. There's a command to show you which services are running inside which svchost instances that I don't remember right now, but I bet if you run that you'll find that there's some other service in that svchost instance that is responsible for the network activity.

Well, of course it would depend on the system, but AFAIK S3 state powers only the RAM and the bare minimum needed to power peripherals to wake it up. 4W is a number I once heard quoted, but whatever your actual power draw is, it'll be much less than S1(~50W AFAIK), and FAR less than just leaving your PC idle all night (100W+). I'm willing to spend a fraction of a cent of power per night to have my PC wake up in the morning in 2 seconds.

Complete agreement.

 

[Sithtiger]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

You do know that you've mixed up quotes from thegorx and myself right.....it's a little confusing.

I didn't mix them up, I just didn't credit who said which part.

As far as what I've said though, Superfetch or more accurately svchost always seems to be connected to the Network when Superfetch is doing it's thing. They are connected in some way....that's for sure.

That's extremely unlikely. There's a command to show you which services are running inside which svchost instances that I don't remember right now, but I bet if you run that you'll find that there's some other service in that svchost instance that is responsible for the network activity.

Well, of course it would depend on the system, but AFAIK S3 state powers only the RAM and the bare minimum needed to power peripherals to wake it up. 4W is a number I once heard quoted, but whatever your actual power draw is, it'll be much less than S1(~50W AFAIK), and FAR less than just leaving your PC idle all night (100W+). I'm willing to spend a fraction of a cent of power per night to have my PC wake up in the morning in 2 seconds.

Complete agreement.

Ahh, Ok. Anyway I did find the correlation of svchost to the network. If you open Task Manager and right-click on one of the svchost....basically the one taking up the most memory....and click on Go to Service(s), one of the services highlighted is Network Connections. If you open up the Services, and open Superfetch, the actual command line is this: C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe -k LocalSystemNetworkRestricted.

 

[Sithtiger]

Originally posted by: BD2003

Originally posted by: Sithtiger
Thanks guys....that's what I started thinking, but I don't understand why I didn't notice all this beforehand...that is the Superfetch doing this the whole time. Just because I'm very anal about things, I might just format and reinstall just to satisfy myself.

Altogether I can think of 3 things that I've installed in the past 3 days. Office XP, GRAW 2 SP Demo and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I just don't recall it taking around 5 minutes or so to do all of this. While looking at the Resource Monitor, I noticed that the specific Svchost.exe that was being used said this Svchost.exe (LocalServiceNetworkRestricted). I don't know why Superfetch would have anything to do with the Network, but apparently it does.

It doesnt matter what you've installed - superfetch is working with all the data on all your hard drives. It is going to load the most frequently used clusters (also dependent on time of day).

If you havent installed ANYTHING, it'll mostly be preloading dlls and other related files.
If you install something, youre likely to use it, and your use of it will lead superfetch to cache it.

But no matter what, it's going to fill up your memory the best way it can. It isnt always perfect, but it does a pretty good job, and its still in general a good thing. The cache can be dumped immediately to make room for whatever you want to load into memory - its a win/win situation, if you can get over the fact that your disk will be thrashing.

If you want to monitor what its actually loading, you can run process monitor on startup, and set it to only view i/o operations. It'll go blindingly fast, but you can get a general idea of whats loading.

On my comp, I can see a few particular things it goes for - MS office files, files from the games I've been playing, itunes and related files, even some browser cache (probably AT files ) - basically, the things I use most often.

Superfetch has nothing to do with the network...don't read into that too much.

Well, I went ahead and formatted and reinstalled. It still does it, but so far it seems to be getting faster each time I boot. I'm booting allot since I'm reinstalling my software. I found someone who said this happened to him and even after he uninstalled Office XP from Vista, Superfetch still seemed to be taking the same amount of time each time he booted. He evidently found the answer at the MS Knowledge Base. I looked but couldn't find anything. Anyway, he said he even though it was uninstalled, some COM and DLL files from Office was still screwing with Superfetch. He had to unregister them manually.

But yeah, by reinstalling, you've basically just undone all of the optimization and indexing that you can had to go through with the few initial boots. And again, superfetch should take the same amount of time each boot - because you have the same amount of RAM. Its going to fill it all. Perhaps office didnt completely get rid of every DLL (what program ever does), so those files were still considered frequently used by superfetch and it preloaded them. Unregistering isnt going to change that - its only concerned with whether the actual file still exists. Over time, if those files are no longer used, they will no longer be preloaded. Just let it do its thing - you cant control it, but having it on is pretty much in every case better than having it off. At absolute worst, it may not help you, but it should never hurt you. Seriously - get over the disk thrashing...its normal! While this thrashing is going on, go into task manager performance tab and look at the "cached" entry...it will continue to rise until the thrashing stops and "free" memory is single digit.

I guess I'll stick to OpenOffice. It's free, takes fewer resources and most of all, it doesn't give me problems!

I've never seen a version of openoffice that uses less resources/memory than a version of office. It may use less HD space, but it most definitely uses a LOT more memory than office.

Yeah, I know I've just undone what it's been doing all this time, but I had to know for sure. It was driving me nuts. I'm actually OK with the HDD thrashing a bit, I just want to make sure it was working properly. See I had a somewhat similar problem with XP a few times. Of course XP didn't have caching like Vista does, but what I mean is, I'd have the HDD thrash and programs would load ultra slow. I noticed this happened when I downloaded a very large file off the Net. I believe the first time it happened to me, I was trying out World of Warcraft and the file was huge....over 1.5GB or so. I was afraid the same thing was going on here.

I guess I got so used to it, I didn't realize it was doing this all along until I was showing my son a trailer of UTIII and it was skipping a bit and it had never done that before.

 

[bsobel]

Connections. If you open up the Services, and open Superfetch, the actual command line is this: C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe -k LocalSystemNetworkRestricted.

LocalSystemNetworkRestricted is a user role which means the service has access to the local machine but does not have rights to do anything on the network (open sockets, connections, etc). It's not a correlatoin of svchost to the network.

 

[BD2003]

Yeah, I know I've just undone what it's been doing all this time, but I had to know for sure. It was driving me nuts. I'm actually OK with the HDD thrashing a bit, I just want to make sure it was working properly. See I had a somewhat similar problem with XP a few times. Of course XP didn't have caching like Vista does, but what I mean is, I'd have the HDD thrash and programs would load ultra slow. I noticed this happened when I downloaded a very large file off the Net. I believe the first time it happened to me, I was trying out World of Warcraft and the file was huge....over 1.5GB or so. I was afraid the same thing was going on here.

I guess I got so used to it, I didn't realize it was doing this all along until I was showing my son a trailer of UTIII and it was skipping a bit and it had never done that before.

That makes perfect sense then - blizzard uses torrents to distribute their files, and nothing will trash your overall system performance like a torrent can. When you normally download a file it doesnt have to basically keep the entire file in memory because it wont need to access whats already been downloaded - but torrents read and write from any part of the file at any time, and with a huge file like that, over time it can push virtually everything useful in memory out to make room for reading and writing the file being downloaded. That thrashing was good ol, "I'm out of memory" disk swapping, and your entire system is put on hold while thats going on..its like the worst case scenario.

Not that things are much better when you run out of memory on Vista, but the superfetch thrashing is completely different. Since the beginning of time, that kind of disk crunching has almost always been alongside something bad, its almost like a pavlovian response by now. If we all had silent solid state drives when Vista dropped, we'd notice the speed increase a lot more than the subjective "WTF is vista doing now, why does it take forever to load" illusory speed decrease kind of stuff.

 

[Sithtiger]

Well Thanks BD2003, you've put my mind at ease now and thanks for pointing out to look at the cached RAM because I know where it's going to stop and now I know it takes the same amount of time to cache too. Now that I know what I'm looking at and for, it makes a big difference.

I did gain something out of the experience besides knowledge though. Prior to this, I was dual-booting with XP and Vista (actually I dumped XP a few weeks ago) and I had originally set my SATA hard drives to be read as IDE via the BIOS. Well as much as this doesn't really matter in the whole, my Windows Experience was at 5.5 because my SATA hard drives were being slowed down evidently. Even though my video card, which is a 8800 GTX and my CPU which is a Q6600 were ranked as 5.9, my drives were dragging it down. Now I get 5.9 across the board and I get to have full use of NCQ with my SATA drives now.

It did make a noticeable difference too. When I first installed BF2142, it probably took around 7 or 8 minutes to install the game. Now that my SATA drives have full functionality, it only took 4 or 5 minutes to install...quite a noticeable difference!!! I don't plan on reformatting again until I upgrade again, which will be around two years. So, then I take it Office XP is safe to install then...heh. I like Open Office, but I've got to admit Office XP looks a little nicer. I'm sure Office 2007 looks really good. Thanks again!

 

[thegorx]

Originally posted by: Nothinman


Everything but the 4W in S3 should be accurate and that only might not be accurate because different hardware will draw different amounts of power.

Which is absolutely retarded, shutting down at night serves no purpose other than saving power so you might as well use sleep or hibernate instead and save yourself some time.

Well ... if you say so, I guess you'd know. I'm not going to even try and respond since I see nothing productive coming from this kind of discussion.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: thegorx

Originally posted by: Nothinman


Everything but the 4W in S3 should be accurate and that only might not be accurate because different hardware will draw different amounts of power.

Which is absolutely retarded, shutting down at night serves no purpose other than saving power so you might as well use sleep or hibernate instead and save yourself some time.

Well ... if you say so, I guess you'd know. I'm not going to even try and respond since I see nothing productive coming from this kind of discussion.

Well, theres nothing really productive about shutting down every night either, so to each their own I suppose.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Sithtiger
Well Thanks BD2003, you've put my mind at ease now and thanks for pointing out to look at the cached RAM because I know where it's going to stop and now I know it takes the same amount of time to cache too. Now that I know what I'm looking at and for, it makes a big difference.

Glad I could help. Because I do understand the whole "WTF is Vista doing" feeling...unless you actually know what its doing, why its doing it, and how its going to help you and not hurt you, it sounds like something is very, very wrong based on everyones experience over the last 15 years.

I did gain something out of the experience besides knowledge though. Prior to this, I was dual-booting with XP and Vista (actually I dumped XP a few weeks ago) and I had originally set my SATA hard drives to be read as IDE via the BIOS. Well as much as this doesn't really matter in the whole, my Windows Experience was at 5.5 because my SATA hard drives were being slowed down evidently. Even though my video card, which is a 8800 GTX and my CPU which is a Q6600 were ranked as 5.9, my drives were dragging it down. Now I get 5.9 across the board and I get to have full use of NCQ with my SATA drives now.

It did make a noticeable difference too. When I first installed BF2142, it probably took around 7 or 8 minutes to install the game. Now that my SATA drives have full functionality, it only took 4 or 5 minutes to install...quite a noticeable difference!!! I don't plan on reformatting again until I upgrade again, which will be around two years. So, then I take it Office XP is safe to install then...heh. I like Open Office, but I've got to admit Office XP looks a little nicer.

I still have it set to IDE mode because every hard drive review I've seen has shown slower performance with NCQ on for single user usage - it would just be overhead in that case since theres not enough conflict that it could come in handy. Although I do remember reading something about Vista's file I/O and NCQ working together in some way, so if you say its faster, I'll certainly take your word. I dont really put much stock in Vista's benchmarking though.

My bios is a bit confusing about it though - theres an entry for AHCI mode, and an entry for Native/Legacy IDE mode, and I'm not sure of the purpose or difference between them.

I'm sure Office 2007 looks really good. Thanks again!

Office 2007 is excellent. If I had to choose between XP/O2007 or Vista/O2003, I'd probably take XP/O2007...it really has helped me work a lot faster and better.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
That's extremely unlikely. There's a command to show you which services are running inside which svchost instances that I don't remember right now, but I bet if you run that you'll find that there's some other service in that svchost instance that is responsible for the network activity.

TASKLIST /SVC

 

[VirtualLarry]

Here's a good question: What good will superfetch do me, if I'm working with 4+ GB files that push everything else out of the filesystem cache. I assume that it would also dump the superfetch cache, which would mean that either: 1) Superfetch would be useless, once this happens, until a reboot, or 2) Superfetch would attempt to reload the superfetch cache after a certain point, dumping my filesystem cache.

The problem that I see is that a lot of stuff that I do is I/O-bound, and the additional overhead, even if it were at a low priority, of 2GB worth of I/O would still slow down my processes, as far as I can see.

I guess if/when I finally adopt Vista, I'll turn off superfetch. I honestly don't see the utility of it, above and beyond the filesystem cache. (Recently opened programs would still be in the filesystem cache, and load instantly anyways without superfetch. And if they weren't, the I/O time is going to be the same whether or not I cause the app to be loaded or if superfetch pre-loads the app. It's the HD speed itself that is the bottleneck.)