Vista Woes

After the most recent big update from Microsoft (As of the date of this posting) my Vista machine returned to its old state of almost totally useless. It again returned to 20 minute start up times and horrendous disk thrashing.

Again I went through all the steps of ensuring I had disabled all the useless services such as the indexer, windows defender and came across superfetch which was also disabled.

I really begrudge having my machine thash itself to death just trying to keep the operating system from falling apart at the seams. Unless you use the pointless search function on the ugly new start menu or what your recently used progams forced into memory before you even ask for them then turning off these services is no problem. The windows defender is usually obsolete as soon as you install any half decent virus killer / spyware removal software.

Even after these changes it was still thashing away, diagnostics flagging up disk queue of 4 indicating the disk was in constant usage. I then ran scheduled a scan disk which took almost a day, from 10 am until 9 pm but after this the machine actually booted in a sensible time and is finally running again.

If anyone else is experiencing horrendous disk thashing on Vista, running a check disk may help, it did for me. Good bye to any actual work I would have liked to have done on it had to go back to a XP on a machine that doesn't spend all day holding the operating system together with duct tape.