Quieting Windows 7 down....

[JimLewandowski]

The blurb in Services about the WMI service say disabling it will cause many Windows functions/systems to not work. I just looked at this reliability index thing for the first time today. Fancy graph for Event Viewer.

Not disagreeing with your expertise, but not many Windows Services say that...

 

[CommonTater]

The blurb in Services about the WMI service say disabling it will cause many Windows functions/systems to not work. I just looked at this reliability index thing for the first time today. Fancy graph for Event Viewer.

Not disagreeing with your expertise, but not many Windows Services say that...

Hey... I've been wrong before .

I always turned WMI off in XP, used to make a big difference in performance, as did shutting down the Performance Counters... It wasn't trivial, you could see the difference. I always found it a bit silly that performance monitoring should have such a big impact on performance... very ironic. But who knows, maybe in Win7 it's different. I'm only a couple of weeks into this OS and I'm still learning...

 

[Greg S]

The blurb in Services about the WMI service say disabling it will cause many Windows functions/systems to not work. I just looked at this reliability index thing for the first time today. Fancy graph for Event Viewer.

Not disagreeing with your expertise, but not many Windows Services say that...

Hey... I've been wrong before .

I always turned WMI off in XP, used to make a big difference in performance, as did shutting down the Performance Counters... It wasn't trivial, you could see the difference. I always found it a bit silly that performance monitoring should have such a big impact on performance... very ironic. But who knows, maybe in Win7 it's different. I'm only a couple of weeks into this OS and I'm still learning...

How's it going with WMI disabled? I'm curious since I read the list of associated services with it(those that needed it). Just a few were security center, ip helper and ics. Of those three, I have two of them disabled already. The security center must be a misprint since I haven't found a security center but then again it may be the security status from the action center. Anywho, I'm curious as to how it's going for you.

 

[CommonTater]

How's it going with WMI disabled? I'm curious since I read the list of associated services with it(those that needed it). Just a few were security center, ip helper and ics. Of those three, I have two of them disabled already. The security center must be a misprint since I haven't found a security center but then again it may be the security status from the action center. Anywho, I'm curious as to how it's going for you.

Thank you for asking Greg...

The "WMIEnable" flag hasn't crashed the system and everything seems to work as before except when I try a performance index (which I really care a rats backside about) it delivers an error message. Everything else seems to work so I'm betting it's not had much effect on the overal system.

That said it is not writing "LastAlive" timestamps every second like it used to. Disk Monitor and Resource Monitor show only activity that I would call "justifiable"... things like up dating the $MFT and $Log sections of NTFS and occasional R/W activity to my NTUSER account, about once every 10 minutes or so.

But... that cursed LED is still flashing once a second, regular as clockwork... Disk Monitor shows no activity, I don't hear any drive stepping... but it's still flashing...

Now the thing is I've done so much to this poor system trying to figure this out that I'm not sure of anything anymore. I was sort of hoping I might convince someone to try this experimentally on a more or less "out of the box" system and see what happened. I understand the lack of volunteers but ultimately confirmation can only come from duplicating my experiment...

In the mean time, until I get a resolution, I've put XP back in the other two machines, so life can get back to normal around here. I'm also going to take the afternoon tomorrow and do a clean install on this machine and see what happens without all my other trial and error mixed in...

Right now, I'm totally open to suggestions...

 

[ultraplanet]

If you guys are talking about the "WMI Performance Adapter" service?? Mine is set to Manual and is not started.

 

[JimLewandowski]

No. The Windows Management Instrumentation. Up higher (alphabetically) in services...

 

[ultraplanet]

Got it ... will look more carefully next time.

 

[CommonTater]

No. The Windows Management Instrumentation. Up higher (alphabetically) in services...

In any event, I'm starting to think that's not it. With the registry flag set and the service disabled, I still get the same behavior... The disk writes are less frequent (couple of times a minute) but that cursed LED is still flashing once a second.

Anybody got any other ideas?

I'm like you Jim... I got very used to a system that would mostly shut itself down when inactive... Monitor off, drives spun down, etc... even when not in standby. This system seems to get busier when I'm not using it...

Actually I wish Microsoft would come clean about this and tell us what's going on... If this is somehow absolutely necessary for Win 7 to work that's one thing... but I will say it's getting very close to being a deal breaker; especially if it's going to shorten my hardware's lifetime.

 

[CarlTR6]

I noticed this kind of activity increased on my desktop when I set a a home network. Whether the laptop is on and logged in or off seems to make no difference in the desktop's activity. I have not done any experimentation with it.

 

[IggyAZ]

The only thing that I have done is turn off all network sharing of directories and printer.
I do not have a network setup at all.

 

[CarlTR6]

I think a lot of that activity has to with network listening and polling. Though I not disabled the network to verify this, I did not have as much activity before I set the network up.

 

[canspec]

I have Win 7 64-bit with the same problem with 4gig of ram...had I known my drive would keep working like this on 64-bit I would have gone with 32-bit..would that solve the problem?

 

[JimLewandowski]

I have Win 7 64-bit with the same problem with 4gig of ram...had I known my drive would keep working like this on 64-bit I would have gone with 32-bit..would that solve the problem?

Nope. I run 32-bit W7 and the drive is constantly busy.

In my old XP days, I trace I/Os (background) to some listener service (pipe - is that the terminology). These were "other I/Os" though and NOT hard-drive access I/Os.

 

[CarlTR6]

Mine, too, is a 32 bit system.

 

[CommonTater]

I think a lot of that activity has to with network listening and polling. Though I not disabled the network to verify this, I did not have as much activity before I set the network up.

There is a Computer Browser service that runs in background. It works along with Network Location Awareness to keep the "My Network" folder up to date. In previous versions --XP and 2k-- these services operated only in memory and did not access the hard disk, that I ever noticed.

As I understand it, the Browser sends a "who's out there" broadcast and the Location Awareness responds with "I'm here"... (or is that the other way around) and the result is kept in memory, providing a list of who's on the net at the moment. If you are making network shortcuts or mapping drives, you don't actually need either of these services running. All they really do is populate that one folder.

I did try turning them off... no change.

To be honest... I no longer think I know what's going on... but something is keeping my drives spun up and preventing standby. I had the desktop on with a 10 minute sleep time and the network cable unplugged for quite some time this afternoon and it was still blinking away at me when I sat down to check in here...

I'm baffled... There seems no way to fix this and I'm going to have to make a rather expensive decision about this very soon.... 6 copies of Win 7 at $200 a pop, gathering dust in the garage is not an easy lump to swallow. But neither is 9 hard disks dying prematurely and all the data that could be lost...

I'm still looking for suggestions... anyone???

 

[Greg S]

In my old XP days, I trace I/Os (background) to some listener service (pipe - is that the terminology).

Yes it is, part of it anyway.

 

[JimLewandowski]

Stopping Vista & 7's constant HD hammering from driving you nuts - techPowerUp! Forums

To stop the noise, do the following:

• Disable scheduled defrags. I went one further and disabled the defrag service
• Disable the the Superfetch service in the Control Panel Administrative Tools
• And finally, turn off the little-known ReadyBoot (not to be confused with ReadyBoost, although they are related and both part of the Superfetch function). Helpfully, there's no service that can be turned off for this and the damn thing constantly hammers the hard disc for many minutes at a time.
  
  You have to edit the registry instead

My disc defrag service was already off (I UNscheduled my disc defrag and maybe that turned it off automatically).

Superfetch is also already off (I never touched it).

I will try the regedit for ReadyBOOT (not readyBOOST). WMI key...!


***UPDATE*** (this seems to match mine)
http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=2072&PN=1

 

[Greg S]

Stopping Vista & 7's constant HD hammering from driving you nuts - techPowerUp! Forums

To stop the noise, do the following:

• Disable scheduled defrags. I went one further and disabled the defrag service
• Disable the the Superfetch service in the Control Panel Administrative Tools
• And finally, turn off the little-known ReadyBoot (not to be confused with ReadyBoost, although they are related and both part of the Superfetch function). Helpfully, there's no service that can be turned off for this and the damn thing constantly hammers the hard disc for many minutes at a time.
  
  You have to edit the registry instead

My disc defrag service was already off (I UNscheduled my disc defrag and maybe that turned it off automatically).

Superfetch is also already off (I never touched it).

I will try the regedit for ReadyBOOT (not readyBOOST). WMI key...!


***UPDATE*** (this seems to match mine)
Sysinternals Forums - $logfile filemon output ,constant writes - Page 1

Interesting. I already have the defrag service disabled. I'm not sure about the other two but will check. Just for the record, I'm not seeing this HD light show that some are having fits with, but I do in a sense have it let's say about 5 minutes after the desktop has loaded and the Cpu has gone down to a steady 1 to 4 percent. When it starts, it lasts for about 5 minutes. Along towards the end of the HD light show, I've noticed that the Action Center flag thingy pops into view. Don't know if it's related or not, just an observation.

 

[JimLewandowski]

This is constant, never-ending HD activity. Virtually all writes. Over and over. $NTFS, logs, .pf files, etc.

Even on a fresh install with no indexing or anything.

 

[CarlTR6]

Greg, I have that same sequence. There are several services that are automatic - delayed start. I think that is what is going on; these services are starting.