Quieting Windows 7 down....

[CommonTater]

I know this has been done to death, or at least the hits from Google makes it seem that way. However I still have the problem and I'm hoping I can get a little help...

I have three computers in a relatively large room. One is a desktop system running ASUS/AMD64 x2, the second is an Acer Aspire One and the third is an ASRock ION 330 which thinks it's my television set. All three are newly updated to Windows 7 Ultimate and networked in the "business network" fashion with half a dozen shares on each machine.

When I had these machines on XP they would sit in standby for hours on end. Even when not in standby they sat idle -- 0 CPU and 0 Disk usage for hours at a time...

Ok so here's the thing... Since updating to Win7 all three of these machines are thrashing their hard disks almost continuously. Even when they aren't bashing the drives the drive lights are still pulsing once a second (approximately)... I can hear the drives stepping so there is some kind of hard disk activity going on... and all three machines are running about 5 degrees warmer than when I had the system on XP. CPU usage is about 3 to 5% continuously on all three machines and even with 30 minute stanby timers it can take several hours before the network goes into standby. Oddly, standby is now all or nothing... the whole thing goes to sleep at once, waking any one of them wakes them all.

At night, when the lights are out and the blinds are closed, this puts on quite the light show... flickering amber and green leds lighting up the room and the soft click click of near constant drive accesses. It's really very disconcerting...

I'm not terribly worried about the desktop machine... I can simply turn it off. But I am concerned about the ASRock which is on 24/7 and the Aspire since it's on batteries...

So... how do I quiet these systems down?

 

[zigzag3143]

I know this has been done to death, or at least the hits from Google makes it seem that way. However I still have the problem and I'm hoping I can get a little help...

I have three computers in a relatively large room. One is a desktop system running ASUS/AMD64 x2, the second is an Acer Aspire One and the third is an ASRock ION 330 which thinks it's my television set. All three are newly updated to Windows 7 Ultimate and networked in the "business network" fashion with half a dozen shares on each machine.

When I had these machines on XP they would sit in standby for hours on end. Even when not in standby they sat idle -- 0 CPU and 0 Disk usage for hours at a time...

Ok so here's the thing... Since updating to Win7 all three of these machines are thrashing their hard disks almost continuously. Even when they aren't bashing the drives the drive lights are still pulsing once a second (approximately)... I can hear the drives stepping so there is some kind of hard disk activity going on... and all three machines are running about 5 degrees warmer than when I had the system on XP. CPU usage is about 3 to 5% continuously on all three machines and even with 30 minute stanby timers it can take several hours before the network goes into standby. Oddly, standby is now all or nothing... the whole thing goes to sleep at once, waking any one of them wakes them all.

At night, when the lights are out and the blinds are closed, this puts on quite the light show... flickering amber and green leds lighting up the room and the soft click click of near constant drive accesses. It's really very disconcerting...

I'm not terribly worried about the desktop machine... I can simply turn it off. But I am concerned about the ASRock which is on 24/7 and the Aspire since it's on batteries...

So... how do I quiet these systems down?

If those specs below are correct you are ram starved, that could make you use the page file almost all the time.

RE the lights put a piece of black tape over them.


Ken

 

[IggyAZ]

If those specs below are correct you are ram starved, that could make you use the page file almost all the time.

RE the lights put a piece of black tape over them.
Ken

I would agree.
Have thought of installing Win7 32bit instead of 64bit?

 

[CommonTater]

If those specs below are correct you are ram starved, that could make you use the page file almost all the time.

RE the lights put a piece of black tape over them.
Ken

I would agree.
Have thought of installing Win7 32bit instead of 64bit?

I am using Windows 7 Ultimate X-86 and all three machines run very comfortably without swap files at all. I don't use monster apps (MS-Word is about as big as it gets) and I don't play computer games so I can squeak through on very modest specs. The memory load runs 400m or less, most of the time.

The big reason I've updated to Win7 at all is the upcoming change in hard disk sector sizes that neither XP nor 2k can accomodate. Plus I do a little amateur software development and probably should be in on the latest stuff.

And, with respect, I don't think black tape is the answer to the problem. These drives are busy enough that I'd be worried about their lifetimes... Both the ASRock and Aspire machines are on 2.5" laptop drives which only increases my concern.

I've already shut down a lot of stuff in Windows 7 and it has helped, but there's obviously a service or driver I haven't found that's doing this...

(Note I've updated my system info to be a little more helpful)

 

[JimLewandowski]

I have constant hard disc activity at full idle. 4G RAM. 32-bit W7.

Mostly write activity. Opposite of XP where the C: drive would actually spin down.

 

[CommonTater]

I have constant hard disc activity at full idle. 4G RAM. 32-bit W7.

Mostly write activity. Opposite of XP where the C: drive would actually spin down.

Interesting observation ... I don't think the drives on any of these machines have spun down since I installed 7... That poor ASRock machine has been blinking once a second for a couple of weeks now... It hasn't gone into standby, except my me putting it there and if the drive light is blinking it's pretty unlikely the drive has parked.

Makes me wonder if they went Dial Up on us and are using "keep alive" tricks to artificially improve system performance????

 

[antharr]

I have Windows 7 64x on a Toshiba laptop with an AMD Turion Dual Core and 4GB of memory and have little to no HDD activity at idle.

 

[JimLewandowski]

I have constant hard disc activity at full idle. 4G RAM. 32-bit W7.

Mostly write activity. Opposite of XP where the C: drive would actually spin down.

Interesting observation ... I don't think the drives on any of these machines have spun down since I installed 7... That poor ASRock machine has been blinking once a second for a couple of weeks now... It hasn't gone into standby, except my me putting it there and if the drive light is blinking it's pretty unlikely the drive has parked.

Makes me wonder if they went Dial Up on us and are using "keep alive" tricks to artificially improve system performance????

My drive has never spun down ever since I installed W7. With XP it did all the time when I walked away.

If you look at Task Manager -> Performance monitor, it's mostly (if not all) write activity. $NTFS log, .PF files, and the paging file (writes, not reads).

 

[CommonTater]

My drive has never spun down ever since I installed W7. With XP it did all the time when I walked away.

If you look at Task Manager -> Performance monitor, it's mostly (if not all) write activity. $NTFS log, .PF files, and the paging file (writes, not reads).

I have been in there and I agree it seems to be timestamping or writing some kind of timed data to these files. I don't use swap files, so that's not part of the problem... But I do wonder what it's writing to the NTFS log and the PF files.

There is an option at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Reliability
which sets a time stamping interval, but changing that doesn't seem to make much difference, to anything.

 

[JimLewandowski]

I've looked into this and got a "not all disc activity is bad" from the morons over at aumha.net. Research and find out where they're going (which I did AND posted).

Sure, these I/Os are not "bad" or "wrong" but is does beg the question:

why have a disc spin-down time for the C: drive (sure it works on my 2nd IDE drive) when even at idle it won't stop

I feel for those with SSDs as I would think this would really kill the life of the drive



I don't have any of the old sysinternals tools that do I/O trace so I could see what Cyl, Head, Sector is being written and possibly coming from what storage location.

 

[CommonTater]

I've looked into this and got a "not all disc activity is bad" from the morons over at aumha.net. Research and find out where they're going (which I did AND posted).

Sure, these I/Os are not "bad" or "wrong" but is does beg the question:

why have a disc spin-down time for the C: drive (sure it works on my 2nd IDE drive) when even at idle it won't stop

I feel for those with SSDs as I would think this would really kill the life of the drive

I don't have any of the old sysinternals tools that do I/O trace so I could see what Cyl, Head, Sector is being written and possibly coming from what storage location.

I rather suspect sysinternals etc aren't going to be of much help here... it may not even be something we can turn off, even if we do find it.

So far I've:

systematically disabled and renabled services
disabled and re-enabled windows search (that makes a difference)
disabled and renabled scheduled tasks
tinkered with 3rd party drivers even when the Win7 ones worked fine
messed with CD autorun and Shell hardware detection
disabled and renabled entire subsystems (Windows audio etc.)
even tried uninstalling my disk drives (boy did it complain about that!)
​

I don't necessarily expect the thing to sit totally dormant when not in sleep mode, but the amount of activity is worrisome... Some have suggested it would calm down after a couple of days... 2 weeks later it's still as busy as it was the first hour.

The Aspire concerns me for the effect on battery life. I used to get about 90 minutes out of the 2200mah battery pack and about 4 hours from the 7200... now it's down to something like 60 minutes and 3 hours.

But it's the ASRock that worries me the most. It's on 24/7 as a music/movie server that is used throughout the house. It's busy all hours of day and night as one of the kids is on shift work... It's also used for most of our downloading since we can send files there to be shared with the whole family.... It's not so easy to turn off. The only grace in that situation is that the drive LED isn't very bright. (The entire room lights up with the LED from the desktop.)

I don't know if this is harmful or not but I can definately hear the HTPC's 500g drive doing long steps once a second... and that's abnormal even when playing movie files.

I dunno... maybe it's much ado about nothing, I like Win 7 in other respects, but this one is just stuck in the old craw....

 

[CommonTater]

I Windows 7 64x on a Toshiba laptop with an AMD Turion Dual Core and 4GB of memory and have little to no HDD activity at idle.

I would be very interested to know if the behavior is different when on power than when on batteries... The Aspire One beahves more or less "normally" on batteries but when plugged in it just keeps blinking away.... I'm wondering if this is something we can go after with power settings...

 

[JimLewandowski]

My write activity is no different now than it was when I first installed W7.

Search/index doesn't make sense to be doing anything when it says "indexing complete" on the applet for Indexing Options.

My question: what could it POSSIBLY be doing to do virtually ALL writes. What's the point? I rarely see reads when the disc is chugging with nothing going on in the foreground.

I've also had my second IDE awakened occasionally and I can't figure out what for as I'm not accessing it in any way.

I think I/O trace by sysinternals would give us a clue regarding access patterns.

 

[CommonTater]

My question: what could it POSSIBLY be doing to do virtually ALL writes. What's the point? I rarely see reads when the disc is chugging with nothing going on in the foreground.

Here's 30 seconds from Disk Monitor (SysInternals)....

5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324568 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235232 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 1278880 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324576 16 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235224 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235208 8 
5:16:34 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6527240 8 
5:16:39 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324592 8 
5:16:39 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235232 8 
5:16:39 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235216 8 
5:16:44 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6498296 8 
5:16:49 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324600 16 
5:16:49 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235224 8 
5:16:49 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235208 8 
5:16:54 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6570968 8 
5:16:56 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6503112 8 
5:16:56 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 562136 5 
5:16:58 AM 0.00000000 0 Write 495944 1 
5:17:00 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 6324616 8 
5:17:00 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 6235232 8 
5:17:00 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 6235216 8

I left this running for an hour while I had breakfast... there were literally tens of thousands of these.... always less than 20 bytes written....

I have to join your quandry.... what could it possibly be doing?

 

[dmex]

5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324568 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235232 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 1278880 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324576 16 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235224 8 
5:16:29 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235208 8 
5:16:34 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6527240 8 
5:16:39 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324592 8 
5:16:39 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235232 8 
5:16:39 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235216 8 
5:16:44 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6498296 8 
5:16:49 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6324600 16 
5:16:49 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235224 8 
5:16:49 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6235208 8 
5:16:54 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6570968 8 
5:16:56 AM 0.00032425 0 Write 6503112 8 
5:16:56 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 562136 5 
5:16:58 AM 0.00000000 0 Write 495944 1 
5:17:00 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 6324616 8 
5:17:00 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 6235232 8 
5:17:00 AM 0.00000954 0 Write 6235216 8

what could it possibly be doing?

Based on that data its obviously writing some data to your drive duh!

Disk Monitor aint going to be very useful unless you know the process and file being modified, grab Process Monitor and leave it running for awhile: Process Monitor

Note, Having anything running or using your machine while its running will generate 100's of events and is not advisable.

You mentioned one machine is acting as a media server, what software are you using to share the media? WMP, Nero...?

Steven

 

[CommonTater]

Based on that data its obviously writing some data to your drive duh!

Very funny... But it's also keeping my drives spun up and preventing my systems from going into standby.

Disk Monitor aint going to be very useful unless you know the process and file being modified, grab Process Monitor and leave it running for awhile: Process Monitor

Just went out and got it, will give it a look...

Actually Resource Monitor is turning out to be the most informative so far... It's actually showing me filenames and amounts read and written... The activity seems to be mostly tied to a couple of files named "LastAlive.da0" and ".da1"... I'm currently thinking it comes from the Reliability testing.... but that cursed led is still flashing...

Note, Having anything running or using your machine while its running will generate 100's of events and is not advisable.

Oh, believe me I'm quite aware of that...

You mentioned one machine is acting as a media server, what software are you using to share the media? WMP, Nero...?

Windows. :shock: Really, it's all done through standard windows file sharing and windows file associations... wanna hear a song or see a movie that's on the server? Just click on it in windows explorer and let your media player do it's thing... I use Media Player Classic, Home Cinema Version on the receiving end... FWIW.

I took WMP and Media center completely off my system (under XP) after it managed to completely chew up the Tags in over 5000 MP3 files I've collected... Seems it knows better than I what constitutes a playlist, imported everything into it's library and then proceeded to reorganize it all into albums... changing the tags as it went and getting about half of it wrong in the process. So it's toast.

Windows 7 was "VLited" so the Speech Recognition, Media Center, WMPlayer and a couple of other minor annoyances never even made it to my hard disks. The actual install is less than 1.4gb and uses about 3.5gb on disk.

 

[JimLewandowski]

I'm from the mainframe (IBM) world so, it mystifies me to see a write with a data-length of 8 (or 20) bytes. I assume this is an 8-20 byte update of SOME 4096-byte disc sector. IOW, in the mainframe world, you write whole BLOCKS of data, not bytes.

It's like it's writing timestamps or something. On my system, all these background writes are PID 4 (System).

 

[CommonTater]

I'm from the mainframe (IBM) world so, it mystifies me to see a write with a data-length of 8 (or 20) bytes. I assume this is an 8-20 byte update of SOME 4096-byte disc sector. IOW, in the mainframe world, you write whole BLOCKS of data, not bytes.

It's like it's writing timestamps or something. On my system, all these background writes are PID 4 (System).

It is writing timestamps to two files... Lastalive.da0 and LastAlive.da1, which explains the constant frive stepping, unless they are right together.

I tried something that seems to have it stopped...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\reliabilityanalysis\wmi\WMIEnable = 0

Thing is I've done so much to this poor thing I don't know if that's all of it or not. It would be nice to see if it works for someone else.

DiskMon says no more writes and I don't hear drive stepping ... but curiously the drive light is still flashing????

 

[JimLewandowski]

Has Task Manager -> Process Monitor show disc I/Os still??

WMI Is Windows Management Instrumentation?? or something.???

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2270-reliabilty-monitor.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20779-reliability-monitor-reset.html

 

[CommonTater]

Has Task Manager -> Process Monitor show disc I/Os still??

WMI Is Windows Management Instrumentation?? or something.???

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2270-reliabilty-monitor.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20779-reliability-monitor-reset.html

Not like before... it will go quiescent for most of an hour then a little burst then quiet again... there's still some activity but not 20 events every 30 seconds.

WMI is part of reliability and performance testing... unless you're benchmarking servers it can safely be turned off.