windows unresponsive and slow while disk activity

[stevena1991]

I am using HP probook 4310s, it got T9600 2.8Ghz, 4gb DDR3 , and 500gb wd hard disk with windows 7 professional x64. The problem is Whenever there is a disk activity such as copying a file or extracting a winrar everything will freeze until those copying or extracting is finished.

Any1 got the same problem?...any idea to fix this?...

 

[zigzag3143]

I am using HP probook 4310s, it got T9600 2.8Ghz, 4gb DDR3 , and 500gb wd disk with windows 7 professional x64. The problem is Whenever there is a disk activity such as copying a file or extracting a winrar everything will freeze until those copying or extracting is finished.

Any1 got the same problem?...any idea to fix this?...

Was this an "upgrade" or clean install?

What does event viewer say? ( type eventvwr in search) look in windows log application log. see if there are any critical errors, that say app hang, app crash, etc.

Let us knwo the event ID and source code


Ken

 

[stevena1991]

I am using HP probook 4310s, it got T9600 2.8Ghz, 4gb DDR3 , and 500gb wd disk with windows 7 professional x64. The problem is Whenever there is a disk activity such as copying a file or extracting a winrar everything will freeze until those copying or extracting is finished.

Any1 got the same problem?...any idea to fix this?...

Was this an "upgrade" or clean install?

What does event viewer say? ( type eventvwr in search) look in windows log application log. see if there are any critical errors, that say app hang, app crash, etc.

Let us knwo the event ID and source code


Ken

i just clean install the laptop as the problem really bothers me. i'll see if it still exist.
is it possible that the cause is the media of the installation as i download the windows 7 iso from digital river content?...

 

[logicearth]

What antivirus are you running if any?

 

[stevena1991]

I got eset nod32.
So the problem still exist, i was working on my assignment while downloading a 1gb file. suddenly the microsoft word stop responding while the download manager rebuild the 1gb file and the ms word respond again after right after the download manager finished rebuilding the file.
This thing really bothers me, i cant do any multitask which involve heavy disk activity. Plz help.

 

[howetechnical]

You may want to try some hardware diagnostic software, such as Seagate's SeaTools just for the hard drive, found here:

| Seagate

and BurnInTest for everything else, such as RAM, etc, found here and is free for 30 days:

PassMark BurnInTest software - PC Reliability and Load Testing

 

[stevena1991]

You may want to try some hardware diagnostic software, such as Seagate's SeaTools just for the hard drive, found here:

| Seagate

and BurnInTest for everything else, such as RAM, etc, found here and is free for 30 days:

PassMark BurnInTest software - PC Reliability and Load Testing

Thx...I'll try that and change the antivirus...

 

[howetechnical]

Thx...I'll try that and change the antivirus...

I wouldn't change the antivirus. Nod32 is a great one, and is gaining a heck of a lot of good buzz in the tech world. I actually implemented the client-server edition of Nod32 on the corporation workstations that I'm IT manager for (400+ workstations and 30 servers) after trying out both Norton and Trend Micro's client-server solutions, and Nod32 out performed both by a long shot.

I would also, however, keep Malwarebytes installed. It's fantastic for getting rid of anything that slips through the cracks that Nod32 (or any other AV software) may miss. Remember, Nod32 is a virus/malware prevention and removal tool, where as Malwarebytes is strictly for removal (it doesn't stop anything from being installed).

 

[stevena1991]

Changed nod32 to free avast, so far so good...will update again if it's really fixed...thanks guys...
btw will i see any improvement in performance if i change my c2d T9600 2.8ghz laptop to a laptop with i5 processor?...

 

[howetechnical]

Just so you know, again, Nod32 is a far better choice than avast (or any free alternative). It has almost no footprint on the system, and scans effortlessly in the background.

As for the slow installs and disk activity, I had the exact same thing on my 1TB WD hard drive. I am even running 8GB of 1066MHz RAM, overclocked AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.6GHz per core, and an NVidia GeForce 9800GTX+, and still the disk activity (such as installing, uninstalling, even opening my browser and files) was painfully slow. I found out that WD's newer hard drives utilize 4kb sector technology, so if you simply cloned an older hard drive onto a new WD one, you might want to check to see if your drive has 4kb sectors (do a search for your model number and "4kb sectors"). Also if you're running Windows XP it will do the same thing since Windows XP doesn't know how to handle 4k instead of the 512b used previously. The good news is you can download a utility on WD's website that aligns the drive to the new format without losing data. The process takes a few hours (at least it did on my 1TB drive), but it fixed everything up for me.

Just do a google search for "Western digital align utility".

 

[stevena1991]

The problem is still there, it's not fixed yet....
use Seagate's SeaTools and there is no error...
the western digital align utility is for those migrating from windows xp only right?...any1 have other idea on how to fix this?...

 

[howetechnical]

The problem is still there, it's not fixed yet....
use Seagate's SeaTools and there is no error...
the western digital align utility is for those migrating from windows xp only right?...any1 have other idea on how to fix this?...

No, the WD align utility is for Windows XP as well as if you cloned an older disk with Windows Vista or Windows 7 on it to a new WD disk. That's what I did (cloned older WD disk to a new 1TB one). Since Windows was originally installed with the 512b standard, it doesn't match up with the 4kb sectors. The utility fixes that, if you have a new WD disk that is.

 

[stevena1991]

The problem is still there, it's not fixed yet....
use Seagate's SeaTools and there is no error...
the western digital align utility is for those migrating from windows xp only right?...any1 have other idea on how to fix this?...

No, the WD align utility is for Windows XP as well as if you cloned an older disk with Windows Vista or Windows 7 on it to a new WD disk. That's what I did (cloned older WD disk to a new 1TB one). Since Windows was originally installed with the 512b standard, it doesn't match up with the 4kb sectors. The utility fixes that, if you have a new WD disk that is.

Do i need to use this?as i got this laptop with windows vista installed...cause seems that the disk will be formatted if i used it...

 

[kanenas]

I'm curious about this too.
Disk activity almost freezes everything else. This is with write-caching enabled.
It happens on both on my XP SP3 and Win7 x64 laptops.
My desktop on the other hand, with an old Pentium 4 chip in it, has no problems at all multitasking.

I think the problem might have to do with the lower speed/cache of the laptop drives (like the ones in my machines).
It could also be the lack of hyperthreading in most of the laptops available. No idea why the BIOS disables it (with no option to re-enable it).

 

[Jonathan_King]

Try switching your SATA setting in your BIOS to AHCI. Be sure to read this first: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html

 

[stevena1991]

Try switching your SATA setting in your BIOS to AHCI. Be sure to read this first: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html

it's on ahci already, what's ide?...anything else you can think of?...

 

[howetechnical]

Stevena, per your earlier post, not the WD align utility does not format your drive. When you use it, it tells you that it's a non destructive utility (unless your system loses power, then you lose everything unless you can recover the data).

Lets go this way, what drive -did- you have, with what OS, and what drive do you have -now-, and did you do a full reformat and re-install on the new drive or clone the old one over?

 

[stevena1991]

Stevena, per your earlier post, not the WD align utility does not format your drive. When you use it, it tells you that it's a non destructive utility (unless your system loses power, then you lose everything unless you can recover the data).

Lets go this way, what drive -did- you have, with what OS, and what drive do you have -now-, and did you do a full reformat and re-install on the new drive or clone the old one over?

i have a wd scorpio blue 500gb (WD5000BEVT) with windows 7 professional 64bit...As i have partition on my drive, i do full reformat on the system partition only, and do a clean install...

 

[MPrice]

Same problem - The solution

I had the exact same problem after a clean install. The answer for me was that the SATA IDE setting in Bios needed to be set to 'AHCI' not 'SATA'. However before changing the Bios I had to first change a setting in the Windows 7 Registry. The setting was under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES, System, Current Control Set, Services, Msahci. The value of the item 'START' had to be modified to '0'. Then I could restart the computer and alter the Bios Setting. The use of AHCI for Hard Drives seems to be a Windows 7 requirement.