Disk Thrashing - disable ReadyBoot (not ReadyBoost)

stormy13 · 20 Jan 2010

As for the solid color,

https://www.sevenforums.com/news/5665...ckgrounds.html

luckman212 · 20 Jan 2010

ah ha. what a weird bug.
anyway, I actually downloaded that hotfix, but when I went to install it, it said it was already installed. so I guess that wasn't my issue. as far as a solid desktop being 'depressing' I guess it depends how you look at it. looking at the same 5 desktop pictures over and over again might also be depressing for some. I use my computer for work mostly so I dont want kittens, flowers, grassy knolls etc back there they are just a distraction to me. Guess that makes me a nerd. oh well

mdloops · 21 Jan 2010

I am pretty stumped. I mean, your system is nice, but is lacking in the storage department. Running one 7200 RPM hard drive without any raid setup or dedicated hardware controller (real, like adaptec $200+ type) is not going to net you much performance when it comes to load times. Load times have not been cpu bound for some time now. Let me put it this way, when I went from a raid 1 with an onboard controller (quad proc, yada yada) to a raid 1 on an adaptec 2405 I gained something like 40-60mbps on average read speed and a few ms on seek. While your startup is slow, I am not too surprised because you have a severe bottleneck in the storage department. There is no single 7200rpm hard drive nor raid controller that comes packaged with a motherboard on the market that will provide great storage performance.

I can try to dig up all of my benchmarks to show that when it comes to performance upgrades people tend to skimp on storage which leads to poor performance.

luckman212 · 21 Jan 2010

i know what you mean. I actually did have a raid1 setup with 2 drives on an adaptec 5445 SAS PCI-E board. it was a real nice board, and with that setup I got around 140mb/sec out of the array vs. ~80mb/sec from the single drive on my ICH10R. The problem is, I installed a 2nd video card and it was too big to fit both video cards and the adaptec board together------- so I had to ditch the adaptec.

I am wanting badly to go to SSD but I keep hearing about all the problems with vendors not supporting "TRIM" etc etc combined w/ the still-too-high price/MB and I am staying away a little longer. Holding out for better price/performance a little later this year hopefully. I am hoping late-2010 will be the year of the SSD.

Rynooch · 22 Jan 2010

I don't think you have a bottle neck issue,
my system is a intel dual core, 4 gb ram, 500 gb 7200rpm SataII Drive running windows 7 64bit and from when i sign in till the desktop loads and ready is about 20 seconds.

Did this issue just start occurring, or have you had this issue ever since you installed windows 7?

luckman212 · 22 Jan 2010

I can't remember- I think it's been only since win7. I also have Outlook in my startup folder. I think that might be contributing to the slow startup times. Gonna try removing outlook from the startup & see if it helps...

luckman212 · 19 Feb 2010

bump, this is still puzzling me. is there NO way to completely disable readyboot on Win7?

19 Feb 2010

IMHO, a consistent slow boot and thrashing HDD would be cause enough for me to first
check the disk for errors. The easy route is to right-click the drive > Properties
> Tools. Click 'Check Now' under 'Error Checking'.

If all is well, take a peek in your Event Viewer (Start > run > eventvwr.msc >
Custom Views > Administrative Events). Look for 'Error' or 'Critical' events --
especially multiple entries of these.

These steps cannot hurt and just might help (even if readyboot ~seems~ to be the culprit).

And, to answer your question: Yes, ReadyBoot can be disabled -- via a few registry edits.
I hesitate to provide those here given the complexity of the Registry and the inherent risk of
making manual changes to it.

FWI, I have disabled SuperFetch, prefetch & readyboot on my SSD and, inspite of a mis-aligned
partition, my system REstarts in 31sec. However, all of these services and functions *should* be left
at their default settings on a HDD as Win7 does a superlative job of handling these boot optimizations.
Any changes should be for trouble-shooting only.

Good luck!

Grinch80 · 20 Feb 2010

luckman212 said:

bump, this is still puzzling me. is there NO way to completely disable readyboot on Win7?

Change the Superfetch parameters to operate on "boot only" and your thrashing will stop. Some will argue against this, but for me, I get no more thrashing, my boot times are fast, and the OS is plenty fast without Superfetch doing it's strange things.

Follow these instructions and set both EnableSuperfetch and EnablePrefetcher to "2". Then enjoy your PC without constant disk thrashing.

Change SuperFetch to Only Cache System Boot Files in Vista - the How-To Geek

kernelist · 14 Mar 2010

Configuration Windows 7, x64, 4 GB memory, AMD 3 cores, 420 GB HDD.
Superfetch, prefetch, readyboost and readyboot are maintained running.

I had this problem with files in the windows\prefetch\readyboot folder being constantly written into during the first 13 minutes after boot-up.
In this folder, I marked the following files as "read only" and the HDD postboot activity is now gone.

ecboot.dqpafm
ecboot.dqpafmsg
etlboot_1.dqpa
etlboot_1.dqpaf
fxboot_1.dqpa
fxboot_1.dqpaf
...
...
fxboot_10.dqpa
fxboot_10.dqpaf

I still have a rather fast boot-up time (times below in milliseconds)
<timing bootDoneViaExplorer="20558" bootDoneViaPostBoot="35258" osLoaderDuration="1799" postBootRequiredIdleTime="10000"