Quieting Windows 7 down....

[CarlTR6]

Seems like folks are obsessed with LED's, especially blue.

LOL... Are we hinting at something Carl?

Actually if you go to anyplace where they have electronics on display, check out the stuff with blue pilot lights vs the stuff with amber or red... those @$#^%@ blue LEDs are easily twice as bright.

I know what you mean. But I would rather see those blue lights in the store than in my rear view mirror!

 

[CommonTater]

The worst are the oncoming LED headlights at night. Those things give you a headache.

View attachment 62737

Oh my... LEDlights...

And for Carl... Round here the last thing you want is flashing blue lights coming up fast in your rear-view... In this area, they're on snow plows....

 

[CarlTR6]

LOL! They're not on snowplows here!!!!

 

[canspec]

Still flashing???

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????

Tried this reg fix of yours here but no diff???

 

[canspec]

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.

Interesting I'll have to poke around in there myself... However, my system will now go into standby even with NTFS updates going on. It sleeps as soon as the current one finishes (usually less than 2 minutes delay).

It was the "lastalive1.dat" and "lastalive0.dat" that were keeping it awake... these use file mode access to the disk which I assume was resetting the sleep timer.

I'm attaching a zip with some of what I've come up with... There are a couple of documents and a .REG file... take a careful look at the REG file before you integrate it... edit out the stuff you don't want. On my machines --and YMMV!-- there was a noticeable improvement.

If I click on the reg file will it tell me exactly what it is inserting before hand? Or better yet can u tell me what in the reg it is changing so I can make a note to change it back. Thanks.

 

[CommonTater]

If I click on the reg file will it tell me exactly what it is inserting before hand? Or better yet can u tell me what in the reg it is changing so I can make a note to change it back. Thanks.

Your precaution is commendable...

If you right click the .reg file you will be able to open it in Notepad and read it's contents. You may want to make note of previous values as you suggest.

Here it is in open text....

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power]
"HibernateEnabled"=dword:00000000
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000000
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Executive]
"AdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads"=dword:00000010
"AdditionalDelayedWorkerThreads"=dword:00000010
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000000
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000002
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\cdrom]
"AutoRun"=dword:00000000
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
"DisableTaskOffload"=dword:00000000
"TCPNumConnectons"=dword:00000080
"DefaultTTL"=dword:00000080
 
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"EnableNegotiate"=dword:00000001
"MaxConnectionsPerServer"=dword:00000010
"MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server"=dword:00000010
"DisableCachingOfSSLPages"=dword:00000001
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"Win95TruncatedExtensions"=dword:00000000
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Reliability]
"TimeStampInterval"=dword:00000000
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters]
"Size"=dword:00000002

 

[CommonTater]

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

Tried this reg fix of yours here but no diff???

You're right. It turned out to be something else entirely... but I had no way of knowing that at the time... way too much going on.

 

[GRoston]

Like someone else said, get ProcessMonitor: I will admit that I have piles of s/w installed on my machine, but MS is the primary culprit when it comes to disk thrashing. A quick look shows near constant activity by svchost - on the order of 100+ disk accesses per second. My disk drive is never quiescent...

p.s. Win7 x64 with 8 GB of memory

 

[CommonTater]

Like someone else said, get ProcessMonitor: I will admit that I have piles of s/w installed on my machine, but MS is the primary culprit when it comes to disk thrashing. A quick look shows near constant activity by svchost - on the order of 100+ disk accesses per second. My disk drive is never quiescent...

p.s. Win7 x64 with 8 GB of memory

Process Monitor was part of solving the problem as was Resource Monitor.

In the end what I did was go through Scheduled Tasks and disable most of them. I also shut down several services Windows Search, Windows Defender, Automatic Updates, etc.

Then I found the timestamping tweak and applied it along with some general performance enhancers and voila... nice quiet system that performs much better than before.

I'm thinking you could probably do some of the same for yourself... really there's no reason a computer with nothing to do should be so busy doing nothing.

 

[MilesAhead]

In the end what I did was go through Scheduled Tasks and disable most of them.

I went through the same thing with Vista 32 bit. Pre SP1 it was really out of tune. Found a lot of stuff in scheduled tasks, like even if you opt out of their performance survey stuff, it was still gathering the statistics. I really had to spend a lot of time with it. I broke my own rule of only buying a PC with preinstalled OS if it has an SP already on. No matter what I did I couldn't get SP1 on that machine. So I did one better and put W7 on.

 

[jasin]

It pays to be deaf

 

[jasin]

You know, you could just get an ssd drive. There is no moving parts in an ssd drive. They are considerably faster too.

 

[CommonTater]

In the end what I did was go through Scheduled Tasks and disable most of them.

I went through the same thing with Vista 32 bit. Pre SP1 it was really out of tune. Found a lot of stuff in scheduled tasks, like even if you opt out of their performance survey stuff, it was still gathering the statistics. I really had to spend a lot of time with it. I broke my own rule of only buying a PC with preinstalled OS if it has an SP already on. No matter what I did I couldn't get SP1 on that machine. So I did one better and put W7 on.

Well, I've gotta be honest, with the amount of screwing about I had to do with this to get it into (what I would consider) a useable state... I'm seriously wondering if I've wasted a fair chunk of change here... In total there are 6 machines in this family and soon to be 7 (upcoming marriage) ... at $200 a pop for Win7, that's not exactly handount change.

I haven't tested the audio and visual capabilities extensively yet but they are the core of computing in this house. An OS that can't handle streaming video out it's network jacks while playing HD video from it's regular video connections would be totally useless to us. Our network is a tangle of shared this and archived that and it's not at all uncommon for me to be watching a movie on my HTPC machine while someone else is streaming a different movie from it's network connection to watch on theirs.

The day of the big test is coming. I've had this on two of my machines for most of a month now and it's beginning to show both good and bad signs. I'm still getting incomplete downloads on larger files (100+ mb) and often video playback is heavily pixellated at random points in random movies (it's almost like it gets tired) and I haven't yet been able to stream a complete movie to another machine from my little ASRock system's DVD player... It's been quite the challenge but XP did this effortlessly.

The thing is that a media intensive setup needs a "nothing else going on" environment to work correctly and Windows 7 simply does not provide that. The machine is never truly quiescent.

As for SP1, I'm dreading the day... I disable auto-updates and rely on service packs for updating. I'm just hoping SP1 will install without undoing everything I had to do to make this work...

Reading the other sections on these forums tells me a lot of people are having less than trivial problems with many modules of the OS and I will confess that has me quite concerned. The sheer number of audio problems, alone, is daunting... then there's all the networking issues I'm seeing... more than a little unnerving.

It's been quite the journey, especially for an OS some people claim needs no tweaking at all...

 

[CommonTater]

You know, you could just get an ssd drive. There is no moving parts in an ssd drive. They are considerably faster too.

It's not about noise, jasin. In this case "quiet" means "not busy".

It's about the responsiveness of the system. If it's busy doing a bunch of background stuff and another request comes along, how much lag before the request can be answered?

Multimedia is a real pain in multitasking systems like windows, network packets or disk chunks have to be delivered in a very timely fashion... delays cause visual and audible distortions that, needless to say, are beyond enfuriating. Anything that would delay a "get next" request is an absolute no-no in these systems.

When I first started this Windows 7 could not play 1080p video on a system specifically designed for it. (ASRock ION 330). The video would pixelate and you could see it dropping frames --a lot of frames-- while the audio burbled and pumped away like crazy. XP did this effortlessly with less than half the CPU time Win7 needed. It was clear that win7 was keeing itself way too busy to do a proper job.

 

[MilesAhead]

@CommonTater

the stuff happening to you sounds just like where I was at with Vista pre SP1. It's like Deja Vu all over again. I can feel your frustration. When I got my Vista 32 settled down after tons of work I made a printout using LookInMyPC with the state of all my Services. When I got my Vista64 PC with SP1 on, I looked through them. All but about 5 were at the settings I did manually. That PC about all I had to do was get Norton completely off and make a few tweaks.It's like night and day between the two systems.

 

[CommonTater]

@CommonTater

the stuff happening to you sounds just like where I was at with Vista pre SP1. It's like Deja Vu all over again. I can feel your frustration. When I got my Vista 32 settled down after tons of work I made a printout using LookInMyPC with the state of all my Services. When I got my Vista64 PC with SP1 on, I looked through them. All but about 5 were at the settings I did manually. That PC about all I had to do was get Norton completely off and make a few tweaks.It's like night and day between the two systems.

Thank you for the Look In My PC idea... Just did the printout. I figure it will be good guidance when I start messing with the rest of the family computers.

Indeed I had quite a time getting this to work the way I wanted.

Say what you like about Windows 7, it is NOT better at multimedia then XP was...

 

[MilesAhead]

...
Say what you like about Windows 7, it is NOT better at multimedia then XP was...

Somebody more knowledgeable about computers than I, once told me, "An operating system is at it's most robust and powerful just before obsolescence." Unfortunately that's how it goes. Just when you start to love the thing, they scrap it!

 

[CommonTater]

Somebody more knowledgeable about computers than I, once told me, "An operating system is at it's most robust and powerful just before obsolescence." Unfortunately that's how it goes. Just when you start to love the thing, they scrap it!

As my father would have put it: "Shoes are always the most comfortable right before they fall apart."

It's true. It seems like we are in a constant cycle of "get it right then toss it" and things never do actually settle in to the point where you can just enjoy. I would still be using XP except for the upcoming change from 512B disk sectors to the new 4K model. I realize I would be fine on XP with my current hardware and software for quite some time but this hardware change means people will most likely just walk away from XP leaving it totally unsupported like they did Win2k when SATA came out.

I would dealy love to come back from my morning walk and have a blank page in my to-do list, instead of "dust, laundry, fix 3 computers, deal with broken network, try to fix download speeds..."
Really, I thought I was retired... Mostly, though, I'm just plain tired.

 

[jasin]

You know, you could just get an ssd drive. There is no moving parts in an ssd drive. They are considerably faster too.

It's not about noise, jasin. In this case "quiet" means "not busy".

It's about the responsiveness of the system. If it's busy doing a bunch of background stuff and another request comes along, how much lag before the request can be answered?

Multimedia is a real pain in multitasking systems like windows, network packets or disk chunks have to be delivered in a very timely fashion... delays cause visual and audible distortions that, needless to say, are beyond enfuriating. Anything that would delay a "get next" request is an absolute no-no in these systems.

When I first started this Windows 7 could not play 1080p video on a system specifically designed for it. (ASRock ION 330). The video would pixelate and you could see it dropping frames --a lot of frames-- while the audio burbled and pumped away like crazy. XP did this effortlessly with less than half the CPU time Win7 needed. It was clear that win7 was keeing itself way too busy to do a proper job.

Then the word "quiet" is being missused.

quiet: making no noise or sound

 

[jasin]

...
Say what you like about Windows 7, it is NOT better at multimedia then XP was...

Somebody more knowledgeable about computers than I, once told me, "An operating system is at it's most robust and powerful just before obsolescence." Unfortunately that's how it goes. Just when you start to love the thing, they scrap it!

View attachment 63488

Most of the problems in an windows OS are not fully fixed until sp2 or 3, which is right around the same time they get ready to release the next OS.