YOUR culprit "MAJOIRTY OF THE TIME" is the indexing that's going on in your background. it is possible that the windows defender is contributing to it but from what ive tested it seems to have little to none impact.
ALSO the .NET service "if your in x64 there's two" which run for a short while that are some optimization service. these are only suppose to run when your pc is IDLE i assume they changed that since they decided to load up at free will and once they were finished the hangs/freezing cleared up. by default i always disable the indexing part but leave "search" enabled so i can still use the start menu etc... and turn off other worthless Microsoft crap.
the superfetch/prefretch would also have some impact but even on lower end hdd i have not even seen this to be a issue anywhere.
Could be, but to say to "everyone" it's the culprit is not great advice imho. Hangs and lockups have countless causes.
That being said, I always do as you too. Disable Windows Search service. The start menu search box still works well for finding Windows apps immediately. Other stuff, I never search for because I know everything on my system and where it is. I don't even use search for myself really. Only to tell others how to pull up certain apps quickly like event viewer or services.msc.
I will give you +1 rep for that.
I have all that stuff like cmd.exe, device manager etc directly on my start menu. (Hmmmm, how did I get a screenshot of the start menu? heh heh)
made it a little more less specific as you are correct not EVERYONE will be the same and tbh the indexing "while its indexing" causes one hell of a performance hit. ive tested it numerous times on fresh formats i would get constant hanging while just navigating listening to my hdd grind away. the only possibilities that come to mind is windows defend/indexing/superfetch/prefetch/.net services. i went through all of these 1 by 1 and seems to be mainly the indexing. the service itself is never been worth the amount of resources it uses unless your in a company that involves searching high volume of files or something.
There are numerous alternatives to Windows search and I could never understand why some people insist on using this crap. If you only need to search files and not content, get Everything Search Engine instead.
My Computer
At a glance
Windows 7 64AMD Phenom II X4 Black Edition 9408 GBNvidia 8800GTS
ive tested it numerous times on fresh formats i would get constant hanging while just navigating listening to my hdd grind away. the only possibilities that come to mind is windows defend/indexing/superfetch/prefetch/.net services.
I can think of lots of things - failing HD, bad driver, WU, network conflicts, malware and more. I don't see Superfetch/prefetch causing the system to "hang" - but it can slow things down at first, but that typically clears after a couple reboots and the system learns your behavior. The point here, I NEVER expect peak performance immediately after an install - give it a couple days of "normal use" to break in and self-tweak.
Seriously..even on my rig (see specs), I keep indexing (Windows Search) Off.
The overhead has never been worth it. I'm pretty organized and know where I can find files. And even if it do need to search, I gladly trade the extra time it takes to rip thru directories on occasion vs the intrusive, constant indexing, the OS does.
Ummm - I think there's a misunderstand here. Indexing is not the same as Windows Search. Indexing is a hold-over from long ago, is disabled by default in Win7, and only included for legacy support.
Windows Search, new in Vista, uses an indexing routine, but it is not the sluggish, resource hog of yesteryear. Windows Search works.
