checking hard drive activity

[ironduck]

I got a new computer with Vista and it's generally working fine, but lately the hard drive is often working like crazy in the background for ages and I can't figure out what it's doing.

Also, when I check memory usage in task manager, it says 1300 MB is used and about 50 is free, so I'm wondering where the remaining 650 MB is hiding..

How do I check what programs are accessing the hard drive?

edit - I found disk usage info in the resource monitor, but it lists a lot of programs, hard to see what exactly it is that's accessing like crazy.. the largest file is some whacky long number under c:\systems volume information\

 

[felagund]

Do you have onboard graphics? Sometimes this uses RAM - but it shouldn't use a whole 650MB! I would get a virus checker and run that just in case u picked up a virus or trojan. I am not too familiar with Vista, but I heard it does a lot of caching of programs/files you frequently use when you are not doing anything. So maybe this is what its doing... does it actually slow your computer down, or does the hard-drive only run when you are not doing anything?

 

[ironduck]

I have a separate graphics card so I'm really at a loss to where the memory is. Right now it says: Total 2046 MB, cached 1313 MB, Free 84 MB. At the same time the 'meter' reads 818 MB. Maybe the meter is the proper number and the 'free' is a bug? Also, why is it caching 1.3 GB of memory, perhaps it means something else by caching than actually using it?

As for the harddrive activity it doesn't seem to cause any slowdowns, but it's just really odd activity, it accesses programs I haven't touched in that session (since restarting), such as Photoshop, as well as files I only accessed last session. Like it's reading it all into memory or something crazy. It usually seems to stop after about 10 minutes or so, until it starts again, that is.. I think there's only been one or two times where it all of a sudden became extremely slow when it shouldn't have been, perhaps the hard drive indexing or whatever is going on accidentally got prioritized.

I've checked with two different virus scanners and they're not finding anything.

My computer is still much faster than my older one, it's just a little weird.

 

[Speedo]

Disk activity on a new Vista PC is almost certainly the indexing service.

What you are seeing memory-wise is Vista's much improved VMM. Rather than leaving tons of memory idle, it puts it to work keeping programs cached for faster loading and etc.

 

[ironduck]

So does it free up memory as soon as it's needed? In the past when I've used Windows XP and earlier it would eventually become so slow after working for a while that I had to reboot. I attributed this to memory fragmentation of some sort (though using mem defrag programs had no effect). I still see this in Vista, although to a lesser degree. So if it's constantly loading stuff into and out of memory that I dont' really need I figure that could be counterproductive since all Windows computers I've had have gotten slower the more work I've put into them over a session. The larger files I work on the slower everything gets even after I've closed them and exited Photoshop.

 

[Speedo]

So does it free up memory as soon as it's needed?

Yes. Programs which have focus get priority access to both CPU & memory.

In the past when I've used Windows XP and earlier it would eventually become so slow after working for a while that I had to reboot. I attributed this to memory fragmentation of some sort (though using mem defrag programs had no effect). I still see this in Vista, although to a lesser degree. So if it's constantly loading stuff into and out of memory that I dont' really need I figure that could be counterproductive since all Windows computers I've had have gotten slower the more work I've put into them over a session. The larger files I work on the slower everything gets even after I've closed them and exited Photoshop.

No amount of voodoo magic programming in the VMM can make up for simply inadequate amounts of memory. I used to see that behavior fairly often on my old machine which had 512MB, but I've never seen it on my current one with 2GB, and my comp tends to stay up for 20+ days at a time.

 

[ironduck]

But why would it be a lack of memory? Example: I load Photoshop and edit a bunch of pictures. Then the computer gets slow so I close down Photoshop again. Shouldn't that free up all the memory that was just used? It certainly did on the previous OS I used, but in the various incarnations of Windows I've had this problem keeps existing.

I often read about computers with uptimes of weeks and months, but that's just impossible with any Windows box I've ever had, after running a bunch of processing they slow down to a snail's pace and nothing but a reboot fixes it..