vista hard drive hack

[centurie]

if like me you are fed up with all that vista hard drive activity then try these.


I. Enable Advanced Performance on Hard Drive

1. open device manager
2. click on "Disk drives"
3. double
click your hard drive to open properties
4. click on policies
tab
5. check the box on "Enable Advanced performance"
6.
click OK to apply

II. Turn off low Hard drive space warning

1. open regedit
2. go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/

Windows/currentversion/policies/Explorer
3. Right click
in right pane & click "New Dword (32-
bit) Value"

4. name Dword "NoLowDiskSpaceChecks"
no quotes in name

5. right click this new name & click on Modify
6. change
value to "1" instead of "0"
7. Click OK to apply

III. Disable
NTFS creating 8.3 version of filenames for
backward compatiblity .

is a backward compatibility
part of the NTFS file system. It goes through all
the files on
your harddisk & make a DOS compatible 8.3(characters) name for
each
file & stores it for reference to the real longer name
in case you ever wanted to
run with DOS. Not the same as Command
window. Sorta like the Search feature. Vista
pretty much dumped
DOS anyway. I never had the need. I disabled it & never had

one issue with it. I'd recommend doing it to cut the overhead
off the hard drive.
with DOS (useless unless
you use DOS)

1. open regedit

2. go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/Current
ControlSet/Control/FileSystem

3. in right pane, right click Dword "NtfsDisable8dot
3NameCreation"

4. click Modify
5. change value to "1"
6. click OK to
apply

this will speed up your vista,and also stop all that hard drive activity that you see when you boot up.


louie

[j0j081]

actually the excessive hdd activity has to do with Windows Defender and the Differential File Comparision thing. I don't see how any of those tweaks you recommended will get rid of it. It's true the first one will speed up your hdds but is also more dangerous if you don't have a backup power source.

[centurie]

try them and then come back and tell me its not a lot faster,.you said "you cant see how these would work" how do you know if you don't try them.

[Bman212121]

Originally Posted by j0j081

actually the excessive hdd activity has to do with Windows Defender and the Differential File Comparision thing. I don't see how any of those tweaks you recommended will get rid of it. It's true the first one will speed up your hdds but is also more dangerous if you don't have a backup power source.

What stopped the trashing for me was turning off system restore. It was probably making new restore points everytime something minute changed.

[j0j081]

Originally Posted by centurie

try them and then come back and tell me its not a lot faster,.you said "you cant see how these would work" how do you know if you don't try them.

I didn't say that it wouldn't be faster. I said it's taking a risk though with your hdds in the high perf mode. The other tweaks have nothing to do with disk activity though.

[Rytr]

When I initially loaded Vista the HDDs were annoying they were so active. I do not remember when it happened but they are no longer as active, no more than XP. I have done nothing to the system that I can think of except for downloading updates.

[A101Sugar]

Originally Posted by Rytr

When I initially loaded Vista the HDDs were annoying they were so active. I do not remember when it happened but they are no longer as active, no more than XP. I have done nothing to the system that I can think of except for downloading updates.

Windows Updates FTW!!!!!!!!


.....not .... lol

[Rytr]

Probably not the updates...that would be a first, but the drives are not kicking off and on every minute or so.
I wish I knew what I did or did not do that stopped that. I did do a fresh install but did nothing but let it install as normal.

[Peoples-Agent]

I think the extra hard drive activity is down to indexing, it does it in the background to speed up the new search gizmo.

[kam03]

its the superfetch feature causing the constant HDD activity.