Windows 8 Dev build

I persisted with winME for 3/4 of a year IIRC, and in that time I re-installed the OS like 3-4 times, each time because of the same problem: even immediately after a cold boot the OS would be almost entirely out of "system resources", and you'd experience repeated program crashes and/or bluescreens when trying to run things. Only recourse would be to nuke the OS and start over from scratch again.

It was pretty much the biggest piece of crap to ever grace the face of the earth. Also, I believe it BSODed during its initial reveal presentation, although that's not a unique event for microsoft. Same thing happened during their windows vista and rt presentations also IIRC. :LOL:
 
Hey guys, when Windows 8 is idle does it set the HDD LED to solid "on"? I had kind of assumed this was a new feature, what with the tablets and all, but if it's not I should probably do something. Probably more or less immediately.
 
Otto Dafe said:
Hey guys, when Windows 8 is idle does it set the HDD LED to solid "on"? I had kind of assumed this was a new feature, what with the tablets and all, but if it's not I should probably do something. Probably more or less immediately.
Click to expand...

When you say idle, is it really idle or do you mean when you're not actively using it?

Not specific to Windows 8 it might be running scheduled jobs, such as:
- search windows update for new updates
- defrag harddisk
- index harddisk
- run .NET optimizations

Which one are run depends on your config (nature of disk drive i.e. is it a SSD, etc.).

Best to check task manager to see if any scheduled jobs are running... on my Win8 machine, the HDD light does not come on unless it's accessing the disk (usually for one of the tasks listed above).

On a related note, I have the 'issue' that the Action Center notification in the task tray keeps showing "Run automatic maintenance to optimize you computer", even when it just ran. Nothing serious, just.... weird
 
dZeus said:
Not specific to Windows 8 it might be running scheduled jobs, such as:
- search windows update for new updates
- defrag harddisk
- index harddisk
- run .NET optimizations
Click to expand...

Windows Update is running just after system start-up. Of course, if you turn it off/on regularly.
Defragment hard disk is an option which should be configured to manual mode, on SSD it should be forgotten once and for all.
 
Grall said:
It's indexing your files...? If so, the drive light should go off eventually.
Click to expand...

Indexing is off, also the LED does not change intensity in the slightest. Even with the fastest file copy I can arrange (~150 MB/s) I still see a bit of variance in the intensity of the LED.

dZeus said:
When you say idle, is it really idle or do you mean when you're not actively using it?

Not specific to Windows 8 it might be running scheduled jobs, such as:
- search windows update for new updates
- defrag harddisk
- index harddisk
- run .NET optimizations

Which one are run depends on your config (nature of disk drive i.e. is it a SSD, etc.).

Best to check task manager to see if any scheduled jobs are running... on my Win8 machine, the HDD light does not come on unless it's accessing the disk (usually for one of the tasks listed above).

On a related note, I have the 'issue' that the Action Center notification in the task tray keeps showing "Run automatic maintenance to optimize you computer", even when it just ran. Nothing serious, just.... weird
Click to expand...

Not actually idle, it seems to happen after 10-15 minutes of no input, with the monitor still awake. Anytime I have resource monitor open and on the disk tab (trying to catch it red-handed) it doesn't happen. Never happened with 7 on the same rig.

I didn't even know about the "run automatic maintenance" thing, and 2am every night could correspond with the activity, so you may have solved my quandary. It's still a bit odd though, because I know when the disks get defragged and it's not that, and the damn .net's should be good and pre-compiled by now. Still, I'm reassured, as long as it's just Windows doing it's own freaky thing and not something intentionally malicious.

I suspect you already know this but I notice you can specifically turn off "Automatic Maintenance" messages under Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Action Center\Change Action Center settings.
 
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Otto Dafe said:
...

I suspect you already know this but I notice you can specifically turn off "Automatic Maintenance" messages under Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Action Center\Change Action Center settings.
Click to expand...

actually I didn't, but I don't care as the notification centre icon is set to always hidden in the task tray.

on another note, today I saw Windows Update proposing a Definition Update for Windows Defender, 1.173.16.0, which is 85.4 megabytes in size...

obviously that's a bit much just for definitions... did they device to replace the entire scanning engine or something? a bit odd to label it as 'definition update' in that case. And as usual, it's pretty hard to find any documentation on what they're pushing to us end-users.

The Windows Update works pretty much like a black box, and you'll just have to trust every update signed with a key that is accepted by Windows Update. Obviously has the potential to be a very effective delivery mechanism if you have one such key and can insert packages somewhere in the network flow from Microsoft's Windows Update server farm to a Windows computer.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a publicly published list of all windows updates including their hash values?

Note: I'm not suspecting to be on the receiving end of pretend-updates, just musing my thoughts on the technical potential

Update: found the changelog for definition 1.173.16.0. So, 85 MB for detecting 2 pieces of malware and a keygen? That's some pretty sophisticated piece of malware to require such a huge definition....
 
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Otto Dafe said:
Hey guys, when Windows 8 is idle does it set the HDD LED to solid "on"? I had kind of assumed this was a new feature, what with the tablets and all, but if it's not I should probably do something. Probably more or less immediately.
Click to expand...

In your system tray, is there an odd little icon that is partly black? If I leave my system idle I get that. Then as soon as I move my mouse it goes away. I think it means Windows Defender is running a quick scan or it is processing other idle tasks. Windows 8 has both a swap file and a page file. It might be loading the swap file.

In the above screenshot, I have a Windows 8 machine with 1 GB of RAM and fast startup disabled. Now that we understand how that works, let’s get down to the new one: swapfile.sys. What the heck is that? Well, it’s basically like the paging file, but serves different purposes.
One of the main reasons for the swapfile.sys is to suspend and resume Metro apps. So why not just use the paging file instead to do that? It’s used because certain types of paging operations can be done more efficiently using this special type of pagefile.
Here’s a more clear explanation. Windows 8 supports both paging and swapping. Paging will hold items that haven’t been accessed in a long time whereas swapping holds items that were recently taken out of memory. The items in pagingfile may not be accessed again for a long time whereas the items in swapfile might be accessed much sooner.
Click to expand...
http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-8/h...s-hiberfil-sys-and-pagefile-sys-in-windows-8/

Also, afaik, Windows likes to use idle time to load into memory the stuff it sees us as using frequently. So that too could be going on. Do you have System Restore enabled or any other file backup options?
 
dZeus said:
Wouldn't it be nice to have a publicly published list of all windows updates including their hash values?
Click to expand...
I think you needn't bother. MS is being watched by so many individuals and organizations that if their update mechanism has been compromised we'd know about it almost instantly.

In any case, MS publishes their KB updates in their...KB database! ;) Hash values I dunno; they might well vary with the language of your OS install.

just musing my thoughts on the technical potential
Click to expand...
The potential is much greater for pretty much any other automatic software update mechanism. In the past, people have been delivered malware through programs like the Curse.com addon manager and things of that sort. Almost every other company out there under the sun spends less money and resources on security compared to MS.

So, 85 MB for detecting 2 pieces of malware and a keygen? That's some pretty sophisticated piece of malware to require such a huge definition....
Click to expand...
Are you sure the file size is correct...? What is the typical size of a defender update? Also, there may be more definitions included in the update other than the mere handful listed by MS, or you have missed some previous updates in the past (or been sent bad/corrupt definitions) and now received a catch-up package.

Lots of hexplanations for this "mystery"! :)
 
Otto Dafe said:
Hey guys, when Windows 8 is idle does it set the HDD LED to solid "on"? I had kind of assumed this was a new feature, what with the tablets and all, but if it's not I should probably do something. Probably more or less immediately.
Click to expand...
yes If I leave win 8 for more than 2 minutes the harddisk just goes apeshit, reading/writing at 100% for hours. I have found no way to stop it, I think its windows defender but even disabling that doesnt help. I wrote about this problem here months ago
googling shows others have this as well, yet noone can find a solution
 
Grall said:
I think you needn't bother. MS is being watched by so many individuals and organizations that if their update mechanism has been compromised we'd know about it almost instantly.
Click to expand...

you mean, like THIS?

Grall said:
In any case, MS publishes their KB updates in their...KB database! ;) Hash values I dunno; they might well vary with the language of your OS install.
Click to expand...
nice, but all Windows defender updates have the same KB number.

Having a hash value list can at least show you if the update came from MS or not.

Grall said:
...
Are you sure the file size is correct...? What is the typical size of a defender update? Also, there may be more definitions included in the update other than the mere handful listed by MS, or you have missed some previous updates in the past (or been sent bad/corrupt definitions) and now received a catch-up package.

Lots of hexplanations for this "mystery"! :)
Click to expand...

It's Windows update that reports the 85.4 MB filesize. Anyone with Windows 8 can verify this as the update was released today.

Normally the definitions are small (in the order of size of tens of KB up to a few megabytes).
 
Babel-17 said:
In your system tray, is there an odd little icon that is partly black? If I leave my system idle I get that. Then as soon as I move my mouse it goes away. I think it means Windows Defender is running a quick scan or it is processing other idle tasks. Windows 8 has both a swap file and a page file. It might be loading the swap file.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that is Windows Defender.

Also, afaik, Windows likes to use idle time to load into memory the stuff it sees us as using frequently. So that too could be going on. Do you have System Restore enabled or any other file backup options?
Click to expand...

I believe in my case the activity is defrag after all. What confused me is that even though in the "Optimize Drives" applet I have defrag scheduled to run every Wednesday at 5am, Windows 8 still may do a pass any night after 2am, as suggested by the "Automatic Maintenance" tab dZeus pointed out to me.

For anyone interested, a good way to see when defrag actually runs is to enter this in powershell:

Code: 
Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Source "microsoft-windows-defrag" | sort timegenerated -desc | fl timegenerated, message
 
Otto Dafe said:
For anyone interested, a good way to see when defrag actually runs is to enter this in powershell:

Code: 
Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Source "microsoft-windows-defrag" | sort timegenerated -desc | fl timegenerated, message
Click to expand...

Defrag and retrim are run exactly once a month on each volume here (Windows 8.0 with SATA SSD in a drive tray with a PATA-SATA bridge chip).

The "Regular Maintenance" task in task scheduler is enabled, and shows exit code "0x800710E0" on last run.
The "Idle Maintenance" task is enabled, and shows exit code "0x8007024B" on last run.

Google shows that this exit code means that "The Administrator has refused the request". Could it be related that because I'm always logged in as a non-privileged user? (I only use my administrator account in combination with UAC, a habit I took with Vista).

I never saw any elevation request for running the scheduled idle task or daily 3am maintenance (regular maintenance).
 
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Last edited by a moderator:
zed said:
heres another thing I saw today, done another search on my harddisk for a file.
same thing the progress bar races to 50% full in 10secs the next 50% takes 10minutes.
heres a suggestion how they should do it, no doubt they log what user has searched for & where.
now each time record how long it took to search at that location. ~eg 10minutes and use that as a basis to do the progress bar on nexttime as a ballpark figure.
Click to expand...

After extensive research ;) I have concluded the progressbar in windows explorer is in fact NOT a progress bar its just an animation like say the 'spinning timer' that the OS is busy and has nothing to do with the search progress at all
 
Davros said:
Your defragging a ssd ?
Click to expand...

At the default windows 8.1, it would automatically trim and defrag probably once a month, but defrag is actually isn't being done to SSD (at least per MS representative, it shown that defrag was being done in the log but wasn't actually running on SSD).
 
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