Vista hard drive thrashing what's the best way to find the culprit

**Waigy** · November 6th, 2010, 02:25 PM

Just over a week ago hard drive started going mental for a few minutes at a time slowing everything right down.

It's now happening more and more often.
The cpu and ram are not working hard , just the hard drive.

I disabled the usual suspects on first installing vista ie. indexing, windows search, automatic defrag and yesterday disabled superfetch.

It seemed to work fine the instant that I disabled superfetch, but it's started again.

What's the best way/program to find out what's causing the thrashing?

There is no particular memory hog or cpu hog showing in process explorer, and I can't see any particular process standing out in DKHardDrive-Light.

I can restart the pc while it is thrashing and it just carries on thrashing when it's restarted.
It stops thrashing when it feels like it then eveything works fine for sometimes a few hours.

Spec :
asus p5qse
dual core pentium d 925 3ghz
4 gig ram
Vista ultimate SP2
80gig c drive and 200gig d drive

**quickoldcar** · November 6th, 2010, 02:57 PM

Did you set your virtual memory to a set amount? Usually windows manages the size, but setting this the same for minimum and maximum will help. Also adding a second drive and set the virtual a set size on that, then remove any virtual memory from the operating system drive also helps.

But my guess in your case may be windows defender or some sort of antivirus thats scanning the drive.

**Waigy** · November 6th, 2010, 03:10 PM

Cheers quickoldcar

I did change my virtual memory settings yesterday, but I thought I had cured the problem by disabling superfetch, so I put it back to the way it was before.
I also disabled windows defender yesterday too.

I'll try changing the virtual memory again.

Both my drives are about 2/3 full and have been for ages, I have tried to delete what I can, but it's the usual cupboard space situation.

Found a guide online yesterday recommending :
C: drive virtual memory 1gb min and max
D: drive system managed

So you recommend no virtual memory on C: drive, what min/max would you recommend on my D: drive?

**quickoldcar** · November 6th, 2010, 03:47 PM

I use 2000 for both min and max. Never had a problem and do quite a lot.

You can also try process explorer to get a more detailed view of whats going on.

**Waigy** · November 8th, 2010, 07:03 AM

FIXED:

Adjusting the swap file didn't work, yesterday the thrashing was continuous so everything was very slow.
Other weird stuff started happening like program exe files becoming icons and desktop icons appearing as white.
If I opened a folder it would take about 10 seconds for it's contents to appear one at a time.

I ran avast thourough scan, malwarebytes anti malware and spybot which took almost 24 hours.

Malwarebytes found virtumonde.sdn trojan but, as I ran avast and spybot at the same time, I can't be sure if that was the main culprit.

Now working fine thankfully as I was preparing myself for a two drive format.

**stroyal** · November 8th, 2010, 08:59 AM

As For your memory settings, as QOC said 2000 is a good manual set point, and you only need 1 set of swap files per operating system.
I have placed them on other than C: in the past, when having a space problem on C:
On a completely different drive they might even be faster, in some cases, but mine where on another partition so, no gain.

Members with large amounts of memory have pointed out, Swap files larger than 2 gig are a waste of hard drive space, as Swap files are needed very little, when you have more than 2 Gig of RAM.
Windows on auto will set the size the same as the RAM, so in those cases you want to set it manually.

If hard drive space is not an issue, and you have more than 2 gigs of RAM, you can set it to auto, but most of it will never be used.

I'm done rambling, hope this helps.