Quieting Windows 7 down....

[Greg S]

Hi Carl, what's your take on the ready boot and super fetch? Have you given those two the axe yet?

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.

 

[CarlTR6]

No I haven't. I will play around with those this weekend.

 

[Greg S]

No I haven't. I will play around with those this weekend.

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.

 

[CommonTater]

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....

 

[CarlTR6]

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....

I just tested your first scenario on my older AUS board. My results are the same as yours. I have not yet tried your second scenario. However, my HD does spin down.

 

[CommonTater]

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....

I just tested your first scenario on my older AUS board. My results are the same as yours. I have not yet tried your second scenario. However, my HD does spin down.

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!

 

[CommonTater]

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...

 

[JimLewandowski]

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.

 

[CommonTater]

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.

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.

 

[Seven Eleven]

7 is constantly optimizing, caching, defraging etc while it is idle. one of the reasons why it is so fast.

 

[CommonTater]

7 is constantly optimizing, caching, defraging etc while it is idle. one of the reasons why it is so fast.

I understand that. However it's so busy at this that my two main computers --one of which is on 24/7-- didn't go into standby for nearly 2 weeks and did so only after I intervened by shutting some stuff down. That's a bit over the top and, quite frankly, it's unhealthy for the system.

Back in the Win2000 days, when you could still call Microsoft and get actual information, one of their software people told me that the configurations of Windows they distribute are set up for 2 things: To install correctly and to run on almost any computer. "Anything beyond that", I was told, "is what settings are for." There is a reason we have access to all these configuration items and that's because there is no one universal setup that works for everyone.

 

[Seven Eleven]

you can check Task Scheduler. in mine there are 32 active tasks. there is lots of tasks with self explanatory names like ScheduledDefrag, Consolidator, DiskDiagnostics, RegIdleBackup...

 

[CommonTater]

you can check Task Scheduler. in mine there are 32 active tasks. there is lots of tasks with self explanatory names like ScheduledDefrag, Consolidator, DiskDiagnostics, RegIdleBackup...

Yep... I saw that. Sure ain't the scheduler I've been used to. I'll probably go through that and Services and see what I can live without...

I did notice the spyware in there... about consolidating and sending User Experience information to Microsoft... now you KNOW that's going to bite it.



Had a bizarre moment this morning... I've been having this problem with the drive LED constantly flashing on my desktop system (which is why I started this thread)... So I checked it this morning... the drive was spun down with the LED flashing once a second... absolutely freaky.

 

[Seven Eleven]

Yep... I saw that. Sure ain't the scheduler I've been used to. I'll probably go through that and Services and see what I can live without...

I did notice the spyware in there... about consolidating and sending User Experience information to Microsoft... now you KNOW that's going to bite it.

i did notice it too. but i think it's disabled by default.

Had a bizarre moment this morning... I've been having this problem with the drive LED constantly flashing on my desktop system (which is why I started this thread)... So I checked it this morning... the drive was spun down with the LED flashing once a second... absolutely freaky.

weird...
my old CD writer, when there is no disc inside, flashes led forever. like, for years already. annoying as hell.

 

[CommonTater]

my old CD writer, when there is no disc inside, flashes led forever. like, for years already. annoying as hell.

Actually it's the motherboard turning on the LED when the system polls the Optical Drive... but you are right, it's mighty annoying, especially when you're trying to catch a nap on the couch.

 

[CarlTR6]

you can check Task Scheduler. in mine there are 32 active tasks. there is lots of tasks with self explanatory names like ScheduledDefrag, Consolidator, DiskDiagnostics, RegIdleBackup...

Yep... I saw that. Sure ain't the scheduler I've been used to. I'll probably go through that and Services and see what I can live without...

I did notice the spyware in there... about consolidating and sending User Experience information to Microsoft... now you KNOW that's going to bite it.



Had a bizarre moment this morning... I've been having this problem with the drive LED constantly flashing on my desktop system (which is why I started this thread)... So I checked it this morning... the drive was spun down with the LED flashing once a second... absolutely freaky.

Mine does that, too, both the hard drive and the DVD drive. And both are idle.

 

[CommonTater]

Had a bizarre moment this morning... I've been having this problem with the drive LED constantly flashing on my desktop system (which is why I started this thread)... So I checked it this morning... the drive was spun down with the LED flashing once a second... absolutely freaky.

Mine does that, too, both the hard drive and the DVD drive. And both are idle.

Well, the good news is that I now know it's merely annoying, not harmful. Given that, I can press forward to the other issues in taming the beast...


I fixed the ultra brite leds problem too... cut the positive wire, insert 1000 ohm resistor, a couple of drops of solder and some heat shrink tubing and voila... nice soft glow instead of a glaring bat-signal on the far wall. Holy luminous overkill, batman!

 

[Seven Eleven]

Actually it's the motherboard turning on the LED when the system polls the Optical Drive... but you are right, it's mighty annoying, especially when you're trying to catch a nap on the couch.

the funny thing is that this specific drive did/doing that on completely different motherboards in my upgrade chain (580VPX, 440BX, nForce3 and now 785G chipsets). many DVD drives that i changed over the years didn't have annoying led flash.

I fixed the ultra brite leds problem too... cut the positive wire, insert 1000 ohm resistor, a couple of drops of solder and some heat shrink tubing and voila... nice soft glow instead of a glaring bat-signal on the far wall. Holy luminous overkill, batman!

my case got ultra bright blue power led. so bright that it even casts shadows. very handy for my bathroom trip at night. no need to turn on the lights xD

 

[CommonTater]

the funny thing is that this specific drive did/doing that on completely different motherboards in my upgrade chain (580VPX, 440BX, nForce3 and now 785G chipsets). many DVD drives that i changed over the years didn't have annoying led flash.

Yeah I know... I'm still trying to make sense of it...

my case got ultra bright blue power led. so bright that it even casts shadows. very handy for my bathroom trip at night. no need to turn on the lights xD

Oh gees, don't even get me started on the "whatever happened to quality" rant...

The resistor trick does work... total cost 5 cents.

 

[JimLewandowski]

I was poking around in Admin tools -> Performance monitor (the big applet, not the one from Task Manager). Under EVENT TRACE SESSIONS I have a bunch of them enabled/running by default (I didn't change anything). IOW, all that are listed are "running".

NTFSLOG is one that's running. However, the directory that it stores these "logs" is empty so maybe it's not really running. I'm tempted to turn NTFSLOG and see if my $MFT and $LOGFILE writes stop.

Will research more tomorrow when I'm awake.