W7 64-bit as slow as Vista 32-bit? Your experience?

I thought this is what they meant by 'the one that works in the background'... Wherever I saw the instructions for turning this feature off (can't remember now), it was to "turn off background defragging."

If this isn't it, why would Windows have scheduled defragging feature, if a separate process was continually defragging in the bg when Windows is idle? There would be no need for scheduled defragging. My guess is (and I might be wrong) that when Scheduled defragging is enabled (which it is by default), the system will perform background defragging whenever the system is idle, regardless of the set time the defrag is supposed to take place. The logic would be that there will be less defragging to do when the official time rolls around.

But I will look into this b/c I am curious now, and do not want any bg defragging going on, as it creates unnecessary wear and tear on a drive, imho.

I just found this MS "blog" on defragging in Vista and Win 7, and I believe I was correct, that bg defragging only occurs when you have the scheduler enabled.

Engineering Windows 7 : Disk Defragmentation ? Background and Engineering the Windows 7 Improvements

Laptops come with loads of crapware - go through Autoruns and the Add/Remove control panel. And remove one of the antivirus suites - you don't need BitDefender and Nod32 - with a removal tool. You also should have clean installed and formatted win 7. Following this go through the drivers guide in my sig and install the latest drivers starting with chipset.

For me 7 x64 is perfect on 2, soon to be 3 machines.

My guess, 2 Anti-Virus suites running together is the majority of your issues.

I was under the impression MS Defender is anti-spyware, not anti-virus. The NOD32 I use is A/V.

@Frostmourne -- I have been building computers since 1988 and never use a laptop off the shelf. Even when I want to use the same OS that came with it, I wipe the drive and do a fresh vLite slipstream install I have made with everything the way I want it, and zero bloatware or crapware. And yes, the correct drivers installed in the correct order, starting with the chipset driver. (And no ridiculous and useless "recovery partition.") Since MS no longer gives me the OS CD I BOUGHT, I download an ISO with a good hash and use that to make my slipstream and to have a "repair" CD.

So far the system has not repeated the slow-down, so I haven't been able to determine what the cause was. If it happens again, I will turn off Defender for the heck of it and see what happens, though one A/V and one A/S running together should not be a problem. There is always a chance, however, that Defender and my version of NOD32 don't get along, regardless.

Well, as luck would have it, it just happened to occur again. I dragged a 1.7MB file to the recycle bin, and got the progress bar, which took several seconds. I repeated the action several times while looking in Task Manager, and saw CPU usage climbed to 51% but could not see in the processes screen what was causing it.

I opened Defender and added the file to the "ignore" list, then tried again, and it still occurred. So I opened NOD32 and disabled AMON, and guess what. That was the problem. I re-opened Defender and added the file back, and left AMON disabled, and all was fine. Enabled AMON again, and the problem reoccurred.

So it seems NOD32 2.7, while mostly working seamlessly with W7 64, isn't the best version to use with the OS. I will switch A/Vs to a 64-bit version.

(And btw, Defender is A/S and not A/V.)

Thanks to everyone for your input. Appreciate it. :)

Ahh OK. In first post Nod32 And Bit defender were mentioned, which are both anti-virus.

Perhaps I misunderstood, apologies.


Glad you found what was causing it, and thanks for updating so we all know :)

Wishmaster said:

Ahh OK. In first post Nod32 And Bit defender were mentioned, which are both anti-virus.

Perhaps I misunderstood, apologies.

No, that was my mistake. I think I said BitDefender when I should have said Defender. I didn't realize there were two programs closely named, or what their differences were until your post made me go check. :) Defender has since been disabled anyway, in favor of SuperAntiSpyware which seems to be playing well with my new A/V, for which I settled on AVAST.

Glad you found what was causing it, and thanks for updating so we all know :)

Thanks to everyone here too... :)

Nice to see my testing help resolve this problem! That is awesome!

Glad it is working now.

Yes, your suggestion that it might be the A/V scanning the file was right on. :)