My system just keeps reading the hard disk.... and reading.... and reading....

Hi for the past few months I feel that my system is seriously slowing
down. I'm running XP Pro on Dell Inspiron 600m, Centrino 1.6, 512mb
(virtual ram set to 768mb). The sytem just constantly goes into a
non-responsive mode reading the hard drive to death, and base on my
experience it definitely happens too often and lasts for too long (on
average 15~30 seconds). The worst cases are when I finish recording TV
programs with TVactive. Each time I push that "stop recording" button
(after 60+ minutes recording producing 700mb+ file), it's almost a
guarantee that the system will go into a 3 minute lockdown, and that's
when I'm lucky! The worst I've sufferred is around 10 whole minutes!
Imagine 10 minutes of reading and writing of data on the hard disk -
that's longer than it takes for me to backup the whole 20GB of my D:
drive through USB 2.0!!!

 

Sounds like virtual pagefile thrashing. Why did you fix the virtual
ram size to such a small number? Set it to "windows managed" or see
below.

AFAICT you are running into resource exhaustion, especially with your
mention of video recording. I would:

[Use the drive manufacturer's diagnostic to ensure that you aren't
having hardware problems. Then run the Windows diagnostic with all
the options turned on.]

Add more RAM, bump it up to a gigabyte.

Defrag the hard drive and set the page file to 4G fixed size. [Yes,
4095 megabytes, disk space is cheap].

Check for hard disk free space, and upgrade to a 7200RPM drive if you
are running low.

 

I would agree that the pagefile is being utilized way too much. Go
into task manager (press ctl-alt-del) and look at performance. If the
pagefile is larger than 300 mb it's usually the bottleneck

Adding ram, defragging, and wiping out a dozen unnecessary startup /
tray TSR's in msconfig will give you a good increase in
performance...but there's only so much you can do when video rendering
or recording on a 600m centrino. If it's still not enough, you need
to lower the video recording resolution or shell out the bucks for a
higher-end computer, maybe XPS.

 

Because I only gave my C: drive 10G : ( and you know Windows has a
gigantic ASS these days, as do most modern programs.

Can you suggest a drive diagnostic program? Can I download from Dell?

I simply refuse to spend money to upgrade some stupid system which
can't handle with 512MB ram. I'd rather buy a new one

I must admit I'm no expert on how pagefile works, but seriously, 4G??
How many progs you'll have to run at the same time to get that filled?

Anyway I'll definitely give it a try when I can around do some
repartitioning.

Yeah C: is 1.4G at the moment - considering your recommendation of a 4G
pagefile, I'd say this is definitely too small?

 

What I really don't understand is WHAT THE HELL is the system doing for
a whole 5~10 minutes that I can't interrupt??? It doesn't add up for
me.

 

Who makes your hard drive? I'd suggest the drive manufacturer's
diagnostic. For instance, IBM/Hitachi drives use the Drive Fitness
Tool from hgst.com

Well, then don't do video recording on it. What, $50 for another
half-gig is too much?

Again, hard drive space is nearly free, well under $2/gig, and 4095 is
the biggest pagefile WinDoze can support, so why not make it so large
that it's size will never be an issue? And make it a fixed size, in
one contiguous piece, and just forget about it. [I've got a separate
swapfile partition, but that's hard to do after the fact.]

What's the total drive size, and how do you have it partitioned? 1.4G
should be OK for very light use, but that's not you...

 

Garbage collection. It's freeing up all that memory that your video
recorder malloc()ed, and since it all lives in the pagefile, it's got
to go thru the pagefile and release it all. It's non-interruptable,
because till it releases the memory it can't do anything else that
might require reallocating it to some other process.

It takes so long because it's probably poorly optimized for the
worst-case, which is what you are doing.

 

Most probably Hitachi (device manager says HTSxxxxxx). I'll check out
the site thanks.

The video recording is the worst case. My general day to day work has
also significantly slowed down within the past few months. Also I have
another desktop running on dual p3 500, 384mb ram and 37gb scsi, and it
does tv recording MUCH more smoother than my laptop - which suggests I
should upgrade my hard drive, not ram? Or it's simply my hard drive is
slowing down...

 

Dude! Seriously Run a 90-90 Hard Drive Diagnostics (Dell™ Hard Drive
Confidence Test Utility) on your System. These are signs of HDD
Failure in the future.........Backup everything you can onto discs(On
RW's if Possible). To run the 90-90 Diags on your I600m.

Running the Hard Drive Diagnostics from the BIOS
To start the BIOS hard drive diagnostic, perform the following steps:

At the Dell BIOS splash screen, press the <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<D> keys at the
same time.
The computer beeps once to acknowledge that the hard drive diagnostics
have been initiated and the following message appears:

IDE Diagnostics running, please wait
Primary

Drive 0: (Drive Model) -


The test may take up to three minutes to run the diagnostics (the time
is dependent upon the size and speed of the drive).
When the diagnostics are complete, one of the following messages
appear:

IDE Diagnostics running, please wait

Primary

Drive 0: (Drive Model) - Pass
Drive 1: No IDE Device

Secondary
Drive 0: (CD-ROM Model) - Diagnostics not supported
Drive 1: No IDE Device

Test complete, Press <Enter> to reboot


Press the <Enter> key and restart the computer.

NOTE: A Primary Drive 0: failure message may also appear. Proceed to
the If the Hard Drive Diagnostics Reports Failures section. An error
code does not indicate a definite drive failure.
If the Hard Drive Diagnostics Reports Failures

If the Primary Drive 0: indicates a failure, perform the following
steps:

Reseat the drive and confirm that the hard drive is recognized in the
BIOS settings.

If the diagnostics continue to fail, you can communicate by e-mail with
a Dell Technical Support Rpresentative for additional troubleshooting
assistance. Navigate to the following link and select the option that
best describes your problem: http://support.dell.com/us/en/emaildell/.


Hey Trust me this is the best Procedure for all DELL H/W.