I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

roosky — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:15:08 GMT

Try:

Disabling system restore on your hard drives.

Disabling scheduled defrag.

If you have 2 hard drives there is a know issue with the second disk spinning down too aggresively and this causes a perceived hang while the disk spins back up to possess the IO.

Vista, 2 weeks on......

Nick Whittome - The Naked MVP — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:46:42 GMT

My rant a couple of weeks ago got some attention from some clever people in Microsoft. A few uploaded

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

NickWhittome — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:04:48 GMT

Hey Ned:

Yes, Orange is MSFT as am I. A couple more questions:

1. How reproducable is the issue - i.e. does it happen every hour, once a day, etc?

It happens at least once a day. It tends to be worst when I am in Outlok 2007. It also happens if I leave the machine overnight (memory leak?)

2. Have you examined the Vista Performance operational event log - it is located in Event Viewer -> App and service logs -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Diagnostics-Performance. It will have a complete history of software and drivers that are causing performance problems on your machine. When you get into state, note the time down then go check that log when possible for that timeframe.

No, I had not. But I will now. Maybe you can make contact with me via the contact form on this blog, happy to send info to you! ;)

3. As a fast 'hammer' step, have you tried running with a clean config using MSCONFIG. Since the issue is going to be 3rd party, MSCONFIG is a good tool to quickly divide and conquer to find which piece it is if an app or service. support.microsoft.com/.../en-us <-- simple steps.

Yes, I can do this. The "Vanilla" system works well, have already proven that. But what good is Vista if I cannot run things on it ;) (Happy to do this again as part of follow up of logs etc)

4. If a clean boot without third party services/apps still does not surface the issue (and considering the two processes you named, this is possible) the issue is most likely going to be a malfunctioning driver, especially one involving Video. Verifying that you have the latest vendor video driver is a great step there, especially if using the (probably quite dated) OEM preloaded driver.

I am using two 3870 ATI cards, and running the current version of Catalyst (8.6) from ATI.

Obviously, we want your experience to be top notch. If the above don't give you any resolution please contact me directly - alias is nedpyle.

I'll drop ye a line :)

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

NickWhittome — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:00:27 GMT

Michael, no Netmon... Neal, I have RAID0 across two 500GB Drives... maybe this is an area I need to look at. I don't really see disk thrashing though.

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

Michael — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:23:09 GMT

Are U running any version of Netmon 3.x on your machine?

I was experiencing some hangs and disk freezes caused by netmon on my 32bit Vista SP1 machine. No probs with 64bit Vista any more.

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

Neal McQuaid — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:14:37 GMT

sounds like the XPS 420 supplied to my folk's house about two months ago.

Bluetooth keyboard and mouse which just lock up randomly (task manager, etc. like you describe above).

@Mike Whalen: yeah, there's is doing the disk trashing regularly. It's running the default RAID 0 across to 300GB drives so not seeing as much of a performance reduction as I should from this trashing - the first time I've seen a Vista box survive the trashing without giving up completely.

the system has been given another three weeks and then it's being sold and replaced with an iMac. Third bad experience with Vista so can't take it anymore!

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

Ned — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:54:34 GMT

Yes, Orange is MSFT as am I. A couple more questions:

1. How reproducable is the issue - i.e. does it happen every hour, once a day, etc?

Obviously, we want your experience to be top notch. If the above don't give you any resolution please contact me directly - alias is nedpyle.

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

NickWhittome — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:28:34 GMT

Maybe, I am not seeing much disk activity. This machine is pretty quick....

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

Mike Whalen — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:41:53 GMT

Hey Nick,

I wonder if you're getting that Disk Thrashing that most people have experienced in Vista. I am running a Lenovo X61 w Vista Business preloaded. I also have an HP with Vista Business loaded myself (it came with Home Ultimate). Both will at times start thrashing the disk inexplicably. During this time, the system become difficult to control. Programs become unresponsive or are very slow to operate, etc.

You will find a lot of this if you search...

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

NickWhittome — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:57:01 GMT

Hi "Orange". Thanks...

This was a new machine, XPS 730, with SP1 preloaded OEM. Are you Microsoft?

re: I am giving Vista 2 weeks.....

Orange — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:35:37 GMT

We would love to help you get the best experience possible on your laptop.

Can I ask, was this an update to an already existing Vista RTM, or was it a new Vista SP1 system from the OEM?

also, installing these excellent perf analysis tools would be a great help.