New
#41
Quieting Windows 7 down....
-
-
-
New #43
Keep me informed, I still have a test image with certain services and such disabled. So far the ones disabled have not presented any side effects and to be honest, it runs smoother. I'm really curious about the WMI as mentioned somewhere in this topic. I may have to load the image up this weekend and try some more things.
-
New #44
Still slogging away at this...
I came across some information that may be relevent...
According to several sources on the net (reliability challenges acknowledged!) on some motherboards the Disk Drive LED will flash once a second, regular as clockwork, without disk i/o taking place. Since the SATA interface does not have a hardware signal for disk insertion the system has to poll the Optical drives to catch changes and launch the Shell Hardware Detection's autoplay feature. Apparently some early SATA motherboards see this as access and will turn on the chassis LED when polled, even if there is no disk in the drive.
So, since I have an older ASUS board I thought I'd put this to the test... Device Manager, DVD/CD roms... Right click on the drive and disable it... The flashing stopped... Ok re-enable the drive flash, flash, flash... Repeat this several times and guess what... it is repeatable...
It would be interesting to see if this works for anyone else who has this problem...
This obviously doesn't fix the problem... I'm not about to leave my Burner disabled... but at least now I know it's mostly harmless.
==========
I also found this one and tested it... this too is repeatable...
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\reliability
set TimeStampInterval to 0
This stops it from writing lastalive1.dat and lastalive0.dat every second.
===========
Ok, so now I know two of the reasons for a heartbeat from that led... now to cut down the rest of the drive thrashing....Last edited by CommonTater; 19 Mar 2010 at 06:57.
-
-
New #46
Thank you Carl... much appreciated.
I haven't had the chance to let this one sit for half an hour and see what the HD does with the TimeStamps turned off yet... but Resource Monitor shows no disk activity for sometimes 5 and 10 minutes with that off.
What a relief to finally find some answers!
-
New #47
Update.... With the timestamping stopped my main system now goes into standby (mode S3) and wakes up for keyboard, mouse or network... as it should.
Still don't know if the drive spins down through... Those Western Digital drives are plenty quiet and it's a bit hard to tell.
Of course I'm still interested in any other suggestions for calming these things down... there's still a fair bit of disk activity when the machine is just sitting there...
-
New #48
To check if drive is spun down, start browsing/navigating through some likely UNtouched folders (i.e. NOT in W7 cache) and if there's a 7-8 second pause at some points, your drive was spun down and has just spun back up.
-
New #49
LOL... yep, that's one way.
I heard it spin up (it makes this little whining sound for about a second) when I sat down to check in here, so it's spun down at least once so far. The main system also goes into standby now...
The Timestamp thing stopped the ASRock's drive LED from flashing in heartbeat fashion but it's been busy with a couple of movies so I've had no chance to check if it goes into standby.
There's still a fair bit of drive activity on both machines. So, I suppose I should check the task scheduler and see what I can stop...
I've already decided to put XP back in the netbook. Win7's a pretty tight fit and I would like to have one XP machine left for testing stuff... so that problem's solved.
Gaining on it... slowly...
I just wish Microsoft had given this some thought before leaving hundreds of us puzzling over this stuff.
-
New #50
7 is constantly optimizing, caching, defraging etc while it is idle. one of the reasons why it is so fast.
Quote