I got my obnoxiously loud Dell XPS box working again by sticking in the original 2GB Nanya RAM sticks it came with, they're only 800MHz, but hey... Beggars can't be choosers.
So it boots up, and the harddrives are grinding away...and grinding away, and grinding, and grinding and grinding. They kept grinding, filling up my physical RAM to a peak of about 93% until dropping back down to about 89%. Any action, like trying to get any actual work done, took at least 5-10 seconds of extra intensive grinding.
So I decided I'd had just about enough of that nonsense, ran services.msc, disabled superfetch and stopped the service. Still the grinding persisted... It just would not stop!
Anyway, windows update managed to finish despite that (even though I'd tried to stop it half an hour earlier while waiting to see if the grinding would go away on its own, so I restarted the PC (even though windows update never asked me to), logged back in...annnndd...
Lo and behold. The grinding calmed itself down after about 15 seconds or so.
God damn microsoft. Trust them to make something that's supposed to speed up/reduce disk access, only to run your performance right down the toilet. Even despite this, my memory useage is pegged at 1,0-1.11GB for just booting the system to the desktop with a minimal amount of resident programs. Basically there's just Security Essentials and nothing else, and I can't see in the task manager what it is that's eating such a horrendous amount of memory.
I sat down and added together the allocated memory of most of the processes in the task manager, and the sum only amounted to less than half, maybe ~480MB or so (there was a dross of tiny processes at the tail end only using 2-3MB each which I never bothered to add).
So where did the rest all go? Some invisible black hole, apparantly. Superfetch's revenge, I dunno.
Anyone have any input to share here, please? I'm at a loss, and I'd rather not have to reinstall the whole damn OS (don't have a service pack CD, so I'd have to download tons of updates, reinstall WoW again with gigs of patches for that as well, and so on.)
Humble thanks in advance.
So it boots up, and the harddrives are grinding away...and grinding away, and grinding, and grinding and grinding. They kept grinding, filling up my physical RAM to a peak of about 93% until dropping back down to about 89%. Any action, like trying to get any actual work done, took at least 5-10 seconds of extra intensive grinding.
So I decided I'd had just about enough of that nonsense, ran services.msc, disabled superfetch and stopped the service. Still the grinding persisted... It just would not stop!
Anyway, windows update managed to finish despite that (even though I'd tried to stop it half an hour earlier while waiting to see if the grinding would go away on its own, so I restarted the PC (even though windows update never asked me to), logged back in...annnndd...
Lo and behold. The grinding calmed itself down after about 15 seconds or so.
God damn microsoft. Trust them to make something that's supposed to speed up/reduce disk access, only to run your performance right down the toilet. Even despite this, my memory useage is pegged at 1,0-1.11GB for just booting the system to the desktop with a minimal amount of resident programs. Basically there's just Security Essentials and nothing else, and I can't see in the task manager what it is that's eating such a horrendous amount of memory.
I sat down and added together the allocated memory of most of the processes in the task manager, and the sum only amounted to less than half, maybe ~480MB or so (there was a dross of tiny processes at the tail end only using 2-3MB each which I never bothered to add).
So where did the rest all go? Some invisible black hole, apparantly. Superfetch's revenge, I dunno.
Anyone have any input to share here, please? I'm at a loss, and I'd rather not have to reinstall the whole damn OS (don't have a service pack CD, so I'd have to download tons of updates, reinstall WoW again with gigs of patches for that as well, and so on.)
Humble thanks in advance.