Windows Vista HDD Performance

I've recently been bothered by Windows Vista's excessive HDD access while the computer was idle and decided to do my own investigation as to the cause. Randomly choosing to perform system maintenance is somewhat inconvenient to people who count on their computers performance.

Read on for a list of the biggest random HDD performance culprits.

How To Find The Culprit

Press CTRL+ALT+DEL and select the Task Manager. Go over to the "Resource" tab and press "Resource Monitor" down the bottom. This is a very handy addition to Vista that will help us find the cause of nearly any performance loss. Expand the "Disk" section and on the column headers click on "Write (B/min)" to order the list by processes that are writing to the disk the most.

Culprit No. 1 - System Restore

This little sucker is the one that will run arbitrarily, normally just after booting for a little while. In the Resource Monitor this one comes up as "System" and normally has a very low PID such as 4. It will be writing to a file that will look something like X:\System Volume Information\{0b7ddd40-4344-11dc-8082-00095be1068b}.

The System Restore makes copies of all your important system information roughly every day and when you do something like install an application. It's purpose is to provide you with a means of recovering from something going when installing new software, getting a virus or updating drivers, etc. There is no way to say "Not now", but you can temporarily disable it.

Go to the Control Panel -> System -> System Protection. In the System Protection dialogue, uncheck all HDD's to turn it off.

Culprit No. 2 - Disk Defragmenter

This one cleans up where files are positioned on your HDD to generally speed up performance. By default it's scheduled to run weekly at 1am on a Wednesday, but often runs at other times if it doesn't get it's weekly schedule in. Still up at 1am? Perhaps reschedule it. Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter. You can modify it's schedule or disable it from there.

Culprit No. 3 - Indexing

This is a system service and runs all the time, also known as SearchIndex. Generally speaking it's not too bad unless you've just dumped a whole heap of files somewhere it monitors. It monitors as you work, so you're rarely bound to actually notice it. If it's playing up you can find it in the control panel and configure it from there.

 

Know of any others? Let us know in the discussion.