How do I turn off disk trashing in Vista?

[Frank]

Help! Too often when I want to play a game, it becomes almost unresponsive. When I exit the game, the harddisk and one processor are used for 100% by svchost for minutes. The priority is background, but when I start the game again, it runs really slow again (minutes per frame), with little harddisk activity. And when I exit the game, svchost again claims those resources for minutes.

I have tried disabling indexing and such, but that doesn't help. The only option seems to be waiting ~10-15 minutes until svchost is done and trying again.

 

[Malo]

What you are seeing is the Superfetch system. When you exit a game, it promptly goes and fills your RAM with files it thinks you want to use, which if you have a decent amount of RAM, can take awhile.

You can disable the service.

 

[Frank]

Thanks. I will.

But why is it making the games so unresponsive when "scheduled and waiting"? Does it reserve the resources up front, or what? And that on a dual core with 2 GB. I really think I should buy 4GB...

 

[Malo]

Thanks. I will.

But why is it making the games so unresponsive when "scheduled and waiting"? Does it reserve the resources up front, or what? And that on a dual core with 2 GB. I really think I should buy 4GB...

I don't really have that kind of trouble with it. Maybe it's finishing a large file dump into memory which it can't cancel? When I load games, it usually stops almost immediately.

If you load the Resource Monitor from the Task Manager, then bring down the Disk area, you can see svchost.exe in it's many iterations and see what it is loading into memory for Superfetch. Maybe you can load a game in the background if possible and see what it is doing still?

 

[Frank]

I have turned off superfetch, but for STALKER that doesn't solve it. It mostly looks like the aggressive caching of Windows isn't releasing memory when it should, or has problems paging unneeded stuff out to disk.

Something like it tells the game that there is a lot of free memory, but when it tries to access it, it has to wait for it to become available.

Anyway, I could play for hours on end when this laptop was still just new, but now I can't. I've thrown away all savegames and started a new game, but that doesn't help.

And also in other games / applications, it happens more and more often that the computer slows down seriously for a while.

I do have a virusscanner and only use FF, and this laptop is only a week old, so I'm at a loss what is causing the problem.

 

[Skrying]

STALKER has a memory leak under Vista I believe...

 

[Frank]

STALKER has a memory leak under Vista I believe...

Ah, that could be it, together with not much rebooting. But it's quite strange that it did work quite well for almost a week.

 

[KimB]

Maybe you're running into the issue described here?
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060

 

[N00b]

What you are seeing is the Superfetch system. When you exit a game, it promptly goes and fills your RAM with files it thinks you want to use, which if you have a decent amount of RAM, can take awhile.

I think it's either Windows Defender or System Restore, probably the latter. Vista will frequently back up the registry and create or purge system restore points. I got the impression, that the OS cannot cancel these operations once they started.

 

[Malo]

I think it's either Windows Defender or System Restore, probably the latter. Vista will frequently back up the registry and create or purge system restore points. I got the impression, that the OS cannot cancel these operations once they started.

Yeah System Restore can't be cancelled and seems to use a lot more resources than it did in XP. I always turn it off when I setup a fresh windows anyway, but system restore shouldn't start doing anything just because he quits a game or loads it. But who knows what MS have coded Vista to do. Definitely worth turning it off though.

 

[Frank]

I disabled Defender right at the start, and I just disabled system restore. See if that fixes it.

Maybe you're running into the issue described here?
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060

Do you know if and where I could download that hotfix? It seems you have to ask customers support...

 

[Malo]

Do you know if and where I could download that hotfix? It seems you have to ask customers support...

You have a PM.

 

[Frank]

Great! That patch seems to have done the trick! So the harddisk trashing was most likely endless paging. Not enough memory left to fill demand.

Now the game only slows down for a short while (~15 seconds, and disregarding the occasional texture fetching, of course) a few times an hour, and picks back up. Still annoying, but quite playable.

Sigh. So that means: upgrade to XP, or add more memory. Which is close to the limit as it is (2 GB) with a 32-bit OS, so that would require buying a 64-bit copy of Vista as well.

I think I'll keep things as they are, or add 1 GB.

 

[Frank]

Well, after some more playing, I have very mixed feelings: now the game simply crashes regulary. There seems to be only one solution: XP.

 

[Frank]

And now just about any game I start behaves really weird and crashes after a while...

So, disabling and fixing all of it doesn't help either. Vista is really the pits, when it comes to gaming.

And you can't say I didn't try!

 

[Kyyla]

That sucks. Luckily I haven't had many problems..

 

[Rainbow Man]

Vista really seems to be quite overengineered yet underachieving. Very strange, and very disappointing.

Yet.. Aero glass is really nice IMO.
Peace.

 

[KimB]

Yet.. Aero glass is really nice IMO.
Peace.

Well, it's definitely got a good look to it. But there are much, much better 3D accelerated interfaces where usability is concerned. Checkout Compiz or Beryl on Linux, or Mac's OS X and later for significantly more useful and usable features.

 

[Kyyla]

Well, it's definitely got a good look to it. But there are much, much better 3D accelerated interfaces where usability is concerned. Checkout Compiz or Beryl on Linux,

If you can get it installed. Anyway, I second the comment about aero being nice.

 

[Dooby]

Well, it's definitely got a good look to it. But there are much, much better 3D accelerated interfaces where usability is concerned. Checkout Compiz or Beryl on Linux, or Mac's OS X and later for significantly more useful and usable features.

Not found anything worth moving to OSX. After hearing how great it was, I was really excited when I was given a MacBook Pro. Thank god I *didn't* pay for the MBP cos OSX is useless as a home user OS. Everytime I want to do something really simple, that is just a given in Windows, I have to install a new program or extension or some crap.

XP/Vista > OSX

Im not saying MS OS's are perfect, but they are waaaaay more usable than OSX.

Yeah System Restore can't be cancelled and seems to use a lot more resources than it did in XP. I always turn it off when I setup a fresh windows anyway, but system restore shouldn't start doing anything just because he quits a game or loads it. But who knows what MS have coded Vista to do. Definitely worth turning it off though.

It can, cos I did. I noticed that 100GB of my hard drive space was "missing". So I turned off SR, got my space back. No worries.