Heavy Disk Acvtivity when Restarting/Booting

[FRipper]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics (More info?)

I am having an ongoing performance problem with Windows XP Pro on my 1.3GHz,
384MB laptop machine. Whenever I bring the system back to life after being
in standby (or whenever I do a cold boot) I finally get my desktop but then
the disk starts getting hit constantly for anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes ...
I don't have a clue what it's doing (or why). This is a problem that has
plagued me for some months now (maybe a year) ... I had kind of resigned
myself to the fact that it's just an idiosyncrasy of XP. After the 3-5
minutes disk gyrations the system seems to settle down and everything is OK.
Now I have run every system cleanup procedure I can think of ...virus scan,
SpyBot scan, defrag, disk clean up, etc. When it is in this state I have
looked at Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del) Processes tab and I see one
instance of svchost and one of lsass whose disk read/write counts are
increasing fairly rapidly. I suspect that these are causing the heavy disk
activity I am seeing. I have gone to START > RUN > CMD and then tasklist
/svc and I get a long list of image names, PID's and services ... I see a
couple of instances of svchost and lsass and when I then do a tasklist /FI
"PID eq (pid number)" where (pid number is the PID number of an instance of
svchost or lsass all I get is the session name (it's always "Console") and
the memory usage of the svchost.exe or lsass.exe process.

Is there some way that I can get some meaningful information that will give
me a clue to what the system is doing during this venture off into
la-la-land when restarting?

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics (More info?)

You're going to have to start doing the divide and conquer thing.

First, make sure you're using the latest BIOS from the vendor.

Next disable all startup programs that have nothing to do with device
drivers, force standby, resume and see what happens. If things behave
normally, then you're going to have enable startup items one at a time, with
a full reboot between, force standby see what happens, etc. until you find
the culprit.
It's also possible that it's a device driver issue. You'll have to disable
non-essential stuff, force standby, resume, etc. until you find the problem.

The most likely suspects from an application standpoint are AV, firewall
and/or optical burning apps. But they aren't the sole possibility.
For drivers, I suggest you using nothing but the drives from the laptop
vendor. Do not install drivers from any other source and that includes
Windows Update unless you need drivers for an add-on device such as a
printer, etc. In the latter case, during the chase down, you'll probably
need to uninstall all drivers for hardware that was not part of the original
laptop package.

There is no easy way to do this. Good luck.

--
Walter Clayton
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.


"fripper" <fripper@insightbb.com> wrote in message
news:9iuge.72229$NU4.16283@attbi_s22...
>I am having an ongoing performance problem with Windows XP Pro on my
>1.3GHz, 384MB laptop machine. Whenever I bring the system back to life
>after being in standby (or whenever I do a cold boot) I finally get my
>desktop but then the disk starts getting hit constantly for anywhere from 3
>to 5 minutes ... I don't have a clue what it's doing (or why). This is a
>problem that has plagued me for some months now (maybe a year) ... I had
>kind of resigned myself to the fact that it's just an idiosyncrasy of XP.
>After the 3-5 minutes disk gyrations the system seems to settle down and
>everything is OK. Now I have run every system cleanup procedure I can think
>of ...virus scan, SpyBot scan, defrag, disk clean up, etc. When it is in
>this state I have looked at Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del) Processes
>tab and I see one instance of svchost and one of lsass whose disk
>read/write counts are increasing fairly rapidly. I suspect that these are
>causing the heavy disk activity I am seeing. I have gone to START > RUN >
>CMD and then tasklist /svc and I get a long list of image names, PID's and
>services ... I see a couple of instances of svchost and lsass and when I
>then do a tasklist /FI "PID eq (pid number)" where (pid number is the PID
>number of an instance of svchost or lsass all I get is the session name
>(it's always "Console") and the memory usage of the svchost.exe or
>lsass.exe process.
>
> Is there some way that I can get some meaningful information that will
> give me a clue to what the system is doing during this venture off into
> la-la-land when restarting?
>
> Thanks.
>