What is it doing? Vista permanent disk caching 1

[Kutter]

Hi all,

I have a quad core P4 2.4ghz 4 gig of ram, and a Nvidia 9600 Graphics card.

The machine is installed (and has been for about a year) with Vista Ultimate edition 64bit.

Now, its begun to show the age old Microsoft problem of slowdown.. So my post is about this, as I am fed up to the back teeth with reinstalling all my crap because Microsoft cant write a decent enough OS that lasts!!

Now I am a PC engineer (or was until about 4 years ago) but I am new to vista and its quirks...

1. As suggested in the title.. Disk caching, hard drive light on permanently. No systems running, no scans in progress..

QUESTION: Why does it do this and how do I go about diagnoising the issue?

2. General slowdown! I defrag, scandisk, run regular Virus, malware, spyware checks. I know how to look after a PC.. Yet STILL Microsoft products slow down after a while!

QUESTION: Why does it do this and how do I go about diagnosing the issue?

QUESTION: General Vista maintenance. Where can I look, what settings can I change, and what can I do 'in general' to reverse this 'slowdown' thats plagued me and every other PC user for many many years! Re-instalation is NOT an option!

Thanks in advance all

Kutter

 

[PRPhx]

Could it be Vista is indexing your HDD(s)??? Have you run chkdsk lately and does it come back ok?

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
I have found that rebooting Windows ( from Windows 286 and up) on a weekly basis can prevent that slowdown..Windows does not seem to release system resources very efficiently in heavy-use systems.





To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[linney]

What is Task Manager telling you? There is a lot of extra information available in Task Manager compared to XP.

How does the machine perform in Safe Mode, or in Normal Mode but with a different user?

310560 - How to Troubleshoot By Using the Msconfig Utility in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310560

How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/929135

How much RAM is installed? What is the age of the machine?

What is going on in the Event Viewer?

These older articles are worth a read.

HOW TO: Set Performance Options (Q308417)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q308/4/17.asp

Computer Speed and Performance May Decrease (Q310419)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q310/4/19.asp

Reinstallation is never an option, but don't machines "fly" after a clean install. One day you may have to perform such an option for some other reason.

One of the biggest reasons for slow downs are security programs. Every time you upgrade or update one they seem to increase by tens of MB in size and try to do everything under the Sun (all at once).

Windows Vista Performance and Reliability Monitoring Step-by-Step Guide

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722173.aspx