Be Excellent To Each Other

Bought a new PC yesterday (my first with Vista) and everything seems to be working fine but the hard-drive is seemingly being accessed CONSTANTLY, even while sitting on an idle desktop. Some brief google searching suggests this is a normal thing for Vista as it constantly does indexing and paging (I have no idea what that means) - surely this can't be a good thing for the life of the drive? :?

Some further google searching suggests that if I turn off automatic indexing this will improve things greatly. Will this blow-up my pc?

All it'll do is make searching slower.

Turn it off. Unless you want everything indexing and stuff, it isn't really worth it.

and Windows search is still a load of shit anyway.

Cheers. Now, are IDE cables the same for SATA drives and the old type?

Edit -disregard this question entirely. I am an idiot!

SATA drives don't use IDE cables, they use SATA cables, natch.
If you're buying a new drive, watch the power sockets on them as some of them have the old style power sockets, and some have newer ones. The power supply in your pc should have some SATA power plugs on it as well though, but I think you can get adaptors.

Edit - sorry, I was too late disregarding you.

I turned off Search in Vista on my new laptop (forcibly, in the end; it kept restarting the indexer even when turned 'off'). Still the constant hard drive access - Lenovo ship a version of Diskeeper Home that insists of doing continuous 'set it and forget it' defragmentation. Uninstalled that.

After much faffing about uninstalling nearly all the other crap Lenovo install (everything bar the fingerprint scanner, which despite my derision before getting the laptop, is nifty), it still sits there poking the disk constantly at an empty desktop, albeit much less than before. Sigh.

Excellently, Windows Update on the pre-SP1 it came with spends ages downloading 40+ updates, with multiple reboots, before offering SP1. Nng. Idiots.

Diskeeper is a pile of shit and they spam you relentlessly even after you request to be taken off the list multiple times. Never use it.

http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/

JKDefrag however works much better and is a thing of beauty.

*Heartily agrees with Dudley*

JKDefrag64 is the shizzle, yo.

If I run a disk defragmentator, and I have dual boot linux, if I run it in Windows, will it corrupt my Linux boot?

No. It won't touch Linux drives as Windows can't see them unless you're doing something exotic with drivers.

Can't vouch for all but JKDefrag's standard mode is simply to go to all drive letters. Linux partitions won't have them.

Apparently Vista does thrash the disk for the first few days of usage but calms down after that. It's doing indexing and cacheing. Once it knows more about how you use your PC it's fine apparently.

Mine tends to start accessing the drive like this affter I leave it doing nothin for a bit. Which i assume is it taking the opportunity to go nuts searching for stuff to index while I'm not using it intensively.

I have to say I've been incredibly impressed with Vista's search function.

Indeed. If you look in the systray you'll see the little magnifying glass glowing when it's indexing.

Hmm, no magnifying glass here. That can't be it then.

Yeah, but you turned it off, didn't you?
I'm a bit late to the conversation, but I'm part of the 'turn it back on' school.

Vista's VM stuff works a little differently to XP, and if my understanding is correct, it will page stuff out when idle at times just so it can free the memory without having to page out when it's in use again.

Then there's the whole superfetch thing where it tries to guess what you'll be running next and pre-caches appropriate files etc.

Have you looked at the "files" bit on the new all-singing all-dancing task manager? That will show the current IO queue. Can't remember the details and the vista machine is my other half's lappy, and she's at work.

Kinda - it'll page stuff out if it's something that it's learned you don't use all that often. If you're working at your desk, for example, it's unlikely to page out the stuff related to email and office because it's learned you flick between them all the time. It will instead page out things that you've got running but don't actively need to access frequently.

I am too drunk and or stupid to see what you mean by this. If you could please xplain ths as though to a three year old I would be happy to hear this pease.

If I could just put my paranoia hat on and dip into the archives of Skeptobot...

http://www.skeptobot.com/search?q=diskeeper

Short Version - diskkeeper is made by those damn scientologists!

Okay, right-click on the task-bar, select task-manager. Select the "performance" tab, click on "resource monitor". It'll ask you to okay running it if you have UAC enabled. Once you do that and it pops up, click on "disk" and it should show you current processes accessing the disk, which file, how much (bytes/min) etc. (worked out by 'doing' -- her lappy is the only Vista box in the house and I don't use it much, so I got the wrong names in prev. post. Sorry!)

That should tell you what's going on wrt file access.

Hope that's clear, writing explanations isn't always my strong point.

Crikey.

Awesome! I didn't know that, this should really help, thanks!

That's pretty cool actually. Now I get to Google all those file processes

Thanks for writing out the explanation.