Can someone tell me what Vista is doing........

[Sipster]

I will be playing a game, BF2142 for example, then all of the sudden it gets real choppy. So I look at my case and my hard drive activity light is solid. It can do this for a couple of minutes at times. This happens wether I'm in a game or not and it seems pretty random.

Why does my hard drive activity go full throttle sometimes???

[Mansize_tissue]

How long have you been running Vista for?

[HotShotMedic]

happens to me too. probably vista indexing stuff. although with a clean install of 64-bit vista and newest nvidia drivers gaming has been better.

[nessus]

Yes, you can. Run the Reliability and Performance Montior. It reports disk activity by process in real-time.

[Sipster]

How long have you been running Vista for?

Been running it for a bit over 2 weeks now. Whatever it's doing, I wish it was smart enough to not do it while I'm gaming.

[jtzako]

Vista doesnt index, defrag etc if anything else is using the disk I/O so its unlikely that is happening. Chances are you have something else on the system that is causing that, or you have a fragmented filesystem and the page file is having to rearrange.

None of my Vista machines do things like you mentioned during games unless the game itself caused it.

[Sipster]

Vista doesnt index, defrag etc if anything else is using the disk I/O so its unlikely that is happening. Chances are you have something else on the system that is causing that, or you have a fragmented filesystem and the page file is having to rearrange.

None of my Vista machines do things like you mentioned during games unless the game itself caused it.


I fully defrag my system after any changes like installing or uninstalling apps. The reason I know it's not the game is even if I exit the game when I notice this issue, the disk activity is still maxed out for a couple of minutes. I look in perf monitor and I believe it's either svhost or system that's maxing out disk activity.

[jtzako]

See if you can figure out which exact process it is that is doing that... there is a nifty utility in vista that you can use to figure it out even better than the standard performance monitor.

Open Task Manager and go to performance and click "Resource Monitor."

You can see exactly what file/app is usinig alot of HDD I/O..

If it *is* something like Indexing then something is wrong as that shouldnt process while the computer is not idle.

[Ikeenen]

My Vista System likes to create restore points all the time maybe it's that.

[Budwise]

nope. Its caused by a feature that is built into Vista that after a certain amount of time the Hard Drive will power down. It will do this even while playing a game and it will cause lag, trust me i know. To get around this you will want to go to your Power Settings, check the Performance setting, then go to advanced and you will find a HD setting in there. It is set to default at 20 minutes. Simply change to 999 or whatever and your problem is solved. You hear your hard drive respin up and your HD light solid because its having to respin up which takes time and will cause lag in game.