Disk thrashing in Vista- problem solved?
Web sites have been buzzing about two problems that users report while running Windows Vista on mobile computers. A lot of users report much shorter battery life with Vista and recently some of them report the main culprits to be Aero Glass and the Windows Sidebar. The other problem, one that I’ve written about several times, is the system-stopping disk thrashing that occurs at inopportune times, practically stopping mobile systems. I’ve been living with this since upgrading to Vista, and of the two problems this has been the more serious one for me. My Fujitsu P1610 has been prone to practically stop as a result of this disk activity, particularly when going into and coming out of standby, or when changing screen orientation.
Kevin reported on a couple of registry edits that effectively turn off the Vista super fetch and paging. I have suspected both of these as potential causes of the dreaded disk thrashing for a while so yesterday I edited the registry to see what happened. What happened was beautiful to behold, my disk thrashing has practically stopped. It now only takes 5 seconds to go into standby and about the same to resume. Overall I’m finding the disk activity to be similar to Windows XP and I am very happy with the outcome.
Bear in mind that I’ve only been running this way for a day so it’s not conclusive. It’s dramatic enough that I felt it worth a mention but as always YMMV. Also be aware that editing the registry can be dangerous so be careful if you try this. I haven’t run long enough to see if this makes a noticeable difference on battery life but since disk activity hits the battery hard I’m certain it can’t hurt.
Hi James: thanks for trying this out on the P1610. How can I get to the registry editor to make these changes? Is there a little batch executable that could run and make these two changes?
Fernando, type in “regedit” on the search bar in the Start Menu. No script file, just manually change both entries and then reboot.
Fernando, I just posted here a script file to apply this hack that is helping many people already!
http://ultramobilepc-tips.blogspot.com/2007/05/make-your-vista-to-run-faster-in-your.html
Do not forget to restart after applying this script.
Ok, I’m still not clear on WTF Vista was *doing* that made it thrash the disk. Can you give some details about that? I’m glad to read of a solution — but is this something will be a Gotcha down the road too?
I have the Q1P and I do notice the disk thrashing but its not that often and when it does, it really doesn’t slow me down. Also I haven’t had a problem going in standby usually it takes 7 secs. and to resume about the same. James keep us inform how it works for you.
HG
In the origamiproject thread you can find tests proving how performance is increased once these hacks are applied.
I have been using these hacks for al least 4 days now, and I have not seem any problems.
http://origamiproject.com/forums/thread/19843.aspx
Sorry to be so dumb, but how do you run the script? When I click on the file nothing happens.
Thanks
Mike, Vista tries to be smart and prefetches content to memory that it thinks you might need next. Problem is on mobile devices with slower processors, hard disks and low memory this can be an unnecessary (and intolerable) overhead. Paging is just that, swapping stuff out to disk as you go along. I think it comes into play during regular usage, standby, hibernation and even ReadyBoost stuff. I’m no expert but that’s what I understand is going on. So far turning it off has been a God send to me.
Charles, I haven’t looked at it but assuming it is a .reg file just right-click it and select install. Back up your registry first though.
Thanks, but on install when I right click.
That should read “no” install option when I right click.
I went ahead and reinstalled Vista on my P1610 and made these registry changes. Kudos go to you guys who figured this out. It does indeed work better now in going into sleep mode (much faster) and dimishing the extent of the disk thrashing episodes.
It does seem though that the disk is still pretty busy (does that happens with UMPCs and others as well?), so I imagine that there will be other tweaks to the registry that can help. There is an “EnablePrefetcher” for example that is set to (3) in mine.
Thanks again, I wish Fujitsu provided this level of technical support.
Check out the silliest issues in vista http://cacheyourcash.blogspot.com/2007/05/vista-vista-vista.html
Hello James:
I was wondering how your P1610 was performing after a few days of making these registry changes. Mine does seem to be performing better, but I still get a LOT of disk activity, even when the machine is pretty idle.
Thanks
P1610 here, I don’t notice much change. In fact I’m on my P1610 right now and every 30-60 seconds I get a major thrash that stutters my typing, then it goes back to normal.
Hopefully you can try that 2gb stick in your P1610 as well, I have a feeling that’s really the only thing thats going to save us.
Fernando, my experience with the changes is still very good. I find the performance overall to be the same as it was under XP, and that makes me very happy. There is still some random disk activity, particularly when idle, which is not surprising because that’s when Windows Desktop Search does it’s indexing of the HDD. It’s not system stopping and goes away as soon as I do something like it should. BTW, you can use the system performance meter to tell exactly what processes are causing either memory or disk activity.
Just my 2 cents – I don’t get the disk thrashing on my vista laptop…maybe its an issue with hardware that’s been upgraded?
hi, i’ve been using a vaio g-type with vista in my live performances, since i moved to vista i’ve
encountered glitches and cutout of the audio signal,-which were not related to the soundcard or processor, these modifications to the registry seem to have corrected the problem, !thank you very much for posting them!
VSS is culprit. Reschedule System Restore defaults from: every day and every startup to once or twice a week.