Computer help request.

[KevinJarvis]

Ok,
I now have my dad's newest computer.
It's an HP slimline. AMD 3600 rated at 2.8ghz. 1.5 gig of RAM.
It has some generic nVidea card with 256 ram of memory.
Vista Home Premium.

While checking it out I immediately noticed that the HD seemed to run quite often. So I opened the system monitor to find that the CPU would spike to 100% every few seconds.
So I started closing some apps that were running. I got the usage down from 30-40% to 7-10%, but the HD still runs every few seconds.

While I wait for a very intelligent reply...LOL...I'll be online looking for tweaks and whatnot.

I was going to use this for my new FS computer but with the way it's running I'm not sure I will now.

Thanks in advance.

[Ford Friendly]

You might want to take a look at the size of the swap file. Is it being system managed or set manually to some figure. If so, what size is it?

Is your antivirus software or defrag running constantly - in the background? It's quite possible that this could be the cause of "(semi-)constant" disk drive accesses.

Really scrutinize the processes that are running. Things like scheduled automatic updates can also cause disk acceses.

What's the size of your Internet Explorer/other browser temp internet files setting? If it's not large enough, things get sent to the trash bin constantly as you surf.

Those are "top of my head" things to check - so they may not appear to be "too intelligent".

Edited to add: 1.5 GB ram is not "optimum" for Vista. I noticed a definite difference once I went over 2GB. I now run 4GB and the difference is fairly dramatic - though other people have said they don't see or feel the difference. From what I've read, with 4GB ram and 32-bit Vista, you actually wind up using 1GB for the O/S and the rest for applications - no user intervention required, it just works that way.

2nd edit. I assume you've done the "normal" performance tweak thing of running something like XP Repair Pro/System Mechanic/Norton Utilities to ensure that the registry is cleaned and optimized.

3rd edit. Is Vista SP1 installed? If not, do so.

[msm8378]

Kevin,

I am not very enthused with VISTA, however you might try Black Viper's website. The guy knows every version of MS Windows inside-out....


http://www.blackviper.com

Hope this helps...

Mathew S. Milutin

[BadPvtDan]

I love Vista (I write this often here) but I do have 16 gigs of RAM.

[msm8378]

Danny,

Good point with regards to having 16GB of RAM.

When VISTA hit the market I wanted to use it, but MS developed it in such a way that the vast majority of XP business apps would not be compatible with it. That left me in a bind when I bought a new computer that had VISTA on it...pay several thousand dollars to upgrade all my business apps or pay about two hundred dollars for a new copy of XP and stick with the tried and true...

The decision was easy needless to say.

Mat

[KevinJarvis]

I love Vista (I write this often here) but I do have 16 gigs of RAM.

I was planning on adding more RAM. I added 1gig to it last time I was back home.
Not sure I want to spend money I don't have on RAM yet till I flesh out why the HD is always running.

Thanks for the tips guys.

[Graham King]

I am not up to speed with Vista yet but in XP another reason for the HD running would be the indexing service. Try swithching it off and see if that does it. If you have Microsoft Office installed it also has an indexing service, normally found in the startup folder of the start menu.

Another one to try is typing msconfig into the run box. Go to the startup tab and see what is set to run on stratup, the culprit might be there. Just uncheck the box next to it and restart Vista. If you run into problems with something then not working you can always go back in and check the box.