Be Excellent To Each Other

Full story here (yes, I know that's really lazy and cheeky when looking for help in the first place!):

http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=72909

Short version: The hard-drive is constantly being accessed, the CPU is grinding to a halt and programs (even just folders) are taking silly times to open. Browsing the net locks up every few seconds. I haven't touched a thing!

Long version includes fun things like screenshots of the resource monitor.

It's got Windows on it.

Install XP, Vista is a load of cock.

The only thing that jumps out at me, is that your Disk Monitor appears to think 10MB/s is the max on the graph. Which is pretty slow. Has your hard drive swapped itself to a slow ass mode?

(I don't use vista, so for all I know they all look like that)

You're both rubbish.

It could be the hard drive - if Windows detects a load of hard drive errors it falls back to 'slow as fuck mode' to try and read the data.
MS talks about it here.

Vista is a load of cock.

Your opinion is hardly helpful to poor, er, (scrolls up) Zen-Chan though, is it? Let's fix his problem before we drag it off topic in the very first posts. Then we can argue about it all you like (although I've just re-installed XP on my home PC, so I don't think we'll be arguing for long).

But it's almost guaranteed to fix his problem! If I could be arsed to reinstall all my bastard programs for the millionith time I'd have wiped Vista off my laptop ages ago. I was just trying to acclimatise myself with this 'new' bollocks bullshit of an operating system. It's like XP, but all the options you're familiar with have been hidden.

I know this sound a bit...helpdesky...but have you tried running the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility?

FTFY

pffft, I've worked out where everything is, but the fact they MOVED things around without making it better just aggravates me. After I turned off all the gimmicky shit it's just like an annoying, buggy version of XP with a fancy login screen.

You mean like they did from 9x to XP? All that gimmicky shit like themes and stuff? After you turn off the all the gimmicky shit from XP (etc etc)

NOTE : I do not run Vista on any of my machines despite now having a DX10 compatible card and being a PC gamer. That's because Vista is NOT FOR ME.

My theme on XP is 'Windows Classic' and I also have Classic Start Menu, and I don't group my taskbar, etc. etc, so yeap, my XP looks like 98. A very stable, quick 98 that doesn't piss me off half as much as the latest incarnation.

Can't Vista do that, too, though? Of course buying Vista to turn it back down to XP that looks like 98 levels is a bit daft, but if you already have Vista...

Vista looks as 'original' as I can make it, but that doesn't excuse the crippling performance issues, the most notable of which is that it somehow fails to fucking cope with video and media player crashes and hangs constantly despite doing everything humanly possible to fix it. Like most microsoft products, it thinks it knows better than you do, and turns on a load of unnecessary shit by default or otherwise bugs you about things you DO NOT WANT.

Install DragonDOS on it.

Hmm, so you changed a load of stuff away from the default because MS thought that it knew better than you, and then stuff stopped working..?

I quite agree, I was just pointing out that people said the same thing about XP when it first came out. And ME, come to that. It was kinda justified with ME, though...

Like I say, I don't run Vista out of choice. All my PC's are perfectly legal Windows installs which I understand is something somewhat quaint, these days. I could upgrade to Vista tomorrow, if I wanted to - I'm sure at least half the board have the know-how to "acquire" it, too. But there's no real gain and quite a few potential downsides.

Which is why I personally am gradually moving everything over to a Linux based system. I have mine streaming to 360, playing media, playing WoW/EvE/CoH/C&C3 etc, pretty much everything I do on Windows. And it was cheaper and stays completely up to date at all times.

That slow Windows Vista install, though, eh? What could be causing it?

No, it never worked, so in your face.

Possible causes:

• Indexing
• System Restore - disable this.
• Prefetch - disable to see if it changes things, it's useful though.
• Windows firewall - again, disable and test.

How long have you had the PC and where did you get it from?

My copy of Vista runs quite well but windows defender keeps popping up and trying to scan all my hard drives. If I don't stop it the machine does slow quite a bit - although nowhere near as much as you report. I'd have guessed at indexing too, but that (and anything else I'd likely know) has been mentioned already.

In my opinion Indexing is the least needed of those 4!
Also; check the physical connections. I accidently bumped one a bit out one day and the hard drive played silly buggers for a while. (Interestingly, it might have reverted to slow-as-fuck mode...I really should go check this when I get home! Thanks Beex/yakyak)

I left that without a comment purely because it's completely covered in the YakYak thread.