Windows 7's Disk I/O activity (on "idle")

Necuno

Necuno

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after watching to much dexters in a row i noticed that win7 had a all of a sudden disk i/o activity spur. a pon investigating i found that it was cuased by either all of the following or one of them:

super fetch - disabled via services
windows search - disabled via services
windows auto defrag - disabled via services and deleted from scheduled tasks (control panel -> admin tools -> scheduled tasks -> Task Scheduler library -> microsoft -> windows -> Defrag and then delete task)

though i did also removed disk indexing too, well i usually do that by default anyways after an install.

-thought i'd share if some other soul out there that noticed his Disk I/O just pop up all the time after a "idle" while.
 
That's by design. Basically the same with Vista as well. Disk defragment and indexing services run when you are not using it, so that you don't get performance degradation when you are actually using it. The machine is using CPU cycles even when you aren't, so they decided to make them count. It does push your I/O up initially, but given enough free time between workings, and keeping your machine usage to shorter periods, you will find the background stuff only runs for short periods. My Vista laptop only runs for about 30 seconds after I stop using, because I give it a chance between jobs. A result thereof is that my machine is a nippy as the day I bought it.
 
graviti said:
That's by design. Basically the same with Vista as well. Disk defragment and indexing services run when you are not using it, so that you don't get performance degradation when you are actually using it. The machine is using CPU cycles even when you aren't, so they decided to make them count. It does push your I/O up initially, but given enough free time between workings, and keeping your machine usage to shorter periods, you will find the background stuff only runs for short periods. My Vista laptop only runs for about 30 seconds after I stop using, because I give it a chance between jobs. A result thereof is that my machine is a nippy as the day I bought it.
Click to expand...

that is debatable; i don't experiance slow downs on neither my machines at work or at home even with a full development enviroment installed, which i anyways only defrag once in every 2 months. the need to constant defrag, index and letting super fetch update definitly is not going to guarentee your total and overall system performance. infact to much I/O activity on a constant basis i would say plays a role in hdd degration.

zakdoc89 said:
What do you mean by time between Jobs? Is it that you leave the PC to rest after 20 mins of work?
Click to expand...
well as i state the norm as graviti puts its; after ±20 mins it starts with its so called optimizations, which tends to be annoying while you watch something.
 
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Something like that. I work in 45 minute sessions, and take a 5 minute break, to stretch etc. I just make sure I don't leave stuff running whilst on the break basically. i.e I try not to run calculating sessions during that time. Machine does it's stuff. I get through a 12 hour day like that quite happily
 
With Windows XP defrag once every 6 months on a development machine was fine. I found on a Vista machine, turning off those features very quickly led to a slow down. I found I had to leave it running. Just a personal experience. I agree though, continual I/O does lead to physical Drive wear and tear. Basically you lose life for performance. Toss up as to which is most important to you.
 
Really grav? I never defragmented my vista drive and it never slowed down at all.

Windows xp i could defrag, clean the reg and still it slowed down to p1 level's:p
 
ok i've decided its better to leave these things of win7 alone, all in all the pc at work was slower when this was not on; so after installing the final i've left that part in vanilla state.

though tinkering was fun ;)
 
Strange though i have the disk writing problem on vista which i sorted out by disabling search and index but windows 7 never had that problem at all ever.
 
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