Vista is officially pissing me off

[Hachoo]

Rebooted my PC today, and was ready to do some multiboxing. I noticed when I logged in after the reboot that my hard drive light was on solid and stayed on, and I could hear the hard drive chunking like theres no tomorrow. Task manager showed NO processes using the hard drive at all even viewing processes from all users (I/O read and write showed that nothing was using I/O). This confused me, but I assumed the only thing that would be spamming the HD like crazy would be the windows indexing...even though I had turned it off (by setting the service to manual) when I first installed Vista.

Low and behold, I looked and the service was still set to manual but it was "Started" - wtf? Microsoft is fucking lame. So, I disable the service which of course doesn't stop the HD from spamming. Now I'm already pissed but I decide to just reboot the computer and hope that when it comes back the service won't be started and everything will be OK. I hit restart, and it goes to the "Windows is Shutting Down" screen... and stays there. For 10 minutes. And its still there, and the hard drive is still going crazy, until I get so pissed I just hit the hard reset button. System comes back up, I log in, the HD light stops, I think "Ok great". Well, 2 minutes later it comes back on full force and its been on for the last 10 minutes. Nothing in task manager showing what might be using I/O, windows search service is now disabled and NOT started, and I have no way of knowing apparently what is accessing my hard drive because the Windows task manager is the most worthless monitoring tool ever invented.

[d0z3rr]

PEBKAC.

The performance monitoring in Vista is ages better than the one in XP. It is very simple to tell what service is thrashing your disk. Manual setting of a service does not mean it's disabled, they can still start in manual under certain conditions. Perhaps you should have set the service to gee I don't know...DISABLED?

Then again you chose a dual-core over a quad-core for multiboxing, so this doesn't surprise me. Imma go get a rowboat for your river of tears....brb.

Well Senior System Admin, can't figure out how to use a brand new OS? 8)

[Ozbert]

It's not just indexing that hammers the crap out of your hard drive after Vista boots... the prefetcher does it too. You might want to look into disabling that as well, although it'll probably increase certain application load times.

[Hachoo]

PEBKAC.

The performance monitoring in Vista is ages better than the one in XP. It is very simple to tell what service is thrashing your disk. Manual setting of a service does not mean it's disabled, they can still start in manual under certain conditions. Perhaps you should have set the service to gee I don't know...DISABLED?

Then again you chose a dual-core over a quad-core for multiboxing, so this doesn't surprise me. Imma go get a rowboat for your river of tears....brb.

Well Senior System Admin, can't figure out how to use a brand new OS? 8)

And apparently you can't read. At all. Immediately after that I said I disabled the service (which by the way stopped nothing), and then rebooted, checked the service which was no longer running, and my HD was still going crazy anyway, for 20+ minutes before it stopped. Oh did I mention the performance monitor showed no disk activity? Better than XP? It looks almost the exact same and doesn't appear to show any information I couldn't get from XP (which was also worthless).

Second, I didn't choose a dual core processor for multiboxing, I've had this processor since long before I started playing more than 1 copy of WoW. Now you're just being an ass for absolutely no reason. The only reason I considered upgrading to another dual core processor is because it was $70 vs $170 for a quad core and I don't feel like throwing random quantities of money at a single video game.

Third, I'm a Sr. Unix/SAN System Admin (which by the way pays almost twice what windows system admins get paid) who happened to work with windows for many years but haven't since around the time Windows XP came out. Lame ass problems like this are the reasons I stopped caring about windows and stopped working with it, because Microsoft can't get their shit together enough to make an operating system worth managing.

Fourth, please don't post in my threads anymore, you're completely unhelpful and rude as hell to boot. Another reason to avoid windows and anyone who likes it.

[Basilikos]

/drama

[Hachoo]

It's not just indexing that hammers the crap out of your hard drive after Vista boots... the prefetcher does it too. You might want to look into disabling that as well, although it'll probably increase certain application load times.

Interesting - I've only had Vista installed for a week but I can say this is the first time it's happened. I also don't have anything installed except firefox, WoW, and keyclone - not sure what it would be prefetching.

[pinotnoir]

I had that happen to my pc and I found what was doing it. I cant remember for sure but I think it was superfetch. It happened once I installed the service pack. I hope I can remember how to find it and disable it because I just built a new system but have not downloaded the service pack yet.

[Vicker]

I use Ubuntu on all my computers. Wow runs quite nicely with Wine.

[Yamio]

With Vista, or any Windows OS, I've learned to disable every service that's not needed for me to play games. My gaming machine which I surf on, has a few more services running, but the PC I use strictly for gaming has just about everything turned off.

Everything in task scheduler? OFF!! All of it. There are a lot of Windows services that most people don't need to have running, but they leave them on anyway cause they don't know what most services do. Sometimes the descriptions are not very intuitive either.

If you need a definitive list go to Black Viper's website. About all he does is game and tweak his systems, listing everything to turn off and things to leave on that are essential for Windows to run correctly. It's pretty comprehensive and occasionally not for the faint of heart, (mainly his registry tweaks), but if you're really wanting to know what does what on your system, Black Viper breaks it down.

http://www.blackviper.com

[Hachoo]

I use Ubuntu on all my computers. Wow runs quite nicely with Wine.

I actually thought about doing this before getting Vista but retracted it since my wife uses the PC sometimes as well and we use it for some other purposes that would make this a bit more of a headache then I wanted right now. I ran Debian Linux on my home PC for a good 5 years without a single Windows computer in the house and only installed XP a couple years ago for a couple games I couldn't play on Wine or Wine-X, its just stayed that way for awhile. Still tempted to go with Linux again anyway just to get this glorified virus off my PC though