Control panel: system…

From there select the system protection tab and alter the system restore options.. i think you’ll find this removes most of the thrashing..

It drove me up the wall trashed system to find culprit my case system restore who are these people that sell operating systems that behave worse than viruses?.

This has been driving me crazy. I bought a new high spec Core Quad Machine, 3gb Ram, 1.5TB running Vista Home Premium. I had a problem with Disk Thrashing at first but upgraded to SP1 and it seemed to die down, appeared to be improved indexing? Anyway the thing is I have random bursts of disk activity that just make my machine unusable, and they last for a long time, generally hours. Even if i reboot it just carries on thrashing where it left off, taking about 45 mins to restart. When I stop the superfetch service it dies down instantly, but I kinda like Superfetch when it’s doing what it should do… annoying.

My Article Explains how to fix this in 2 easy steps.
http://www.ejtsystems.com/2008/08/13/vistas-disk-thrashing-tweak/

I hope it helps.

For me the problem was solved within seconds of disabling Superfetch (Services > Superfetch). Prior to this, disabling the indexing service, disk defrag and windows updates seemed to make little or no difference to the hard disk thrashing.

It seems to be coming from either the indexing service, windows updates, superfetch, or disk defrag. Its just windows automatically fixing things in the background. The only time I see this is when I start up, after that it only happens once in a while.

Tip: Go into task manager and click on performance monitor…you can see whats thrashing your disk.

SP1 fixes most of these issues, they also go away over time.

Note: This can happen in XP when Processidletasks its doing its “stuff” though its no so much of a kick in the teeth.

I’ve experienced the same issues as well. Will take a look at the suggestions posted here (turning off system restore, defrag, turn off superfetch, etc)

But before that I’m installing SP1 to see if that does the trick. I’ve got to say that after spending $1700 on a new top of the line laptop 2.3Ghz 2GB RAM. Ok, so not tip-top of the line, I figured I’d get the extra 2GB when prices were lower and it was necessary to have. Requiring 4GB of RAM (which just happens to be the max Vista can address) is over the top… very disappointing.

I turned system restore off and the thrashing stopped immediately too. FWIW this is on a high-end system: 3.2GHz core2duo, 4GB of ram and a raptor system drive. Also I’m running SP1RC so don’t expect that to fix the problem!

Be glad to hear that on Vista with SP1 ( current version SPRC1, v.744 ) all these background stuff seems to be gone or hardly noticeable. So look out when SP1 arrives.
It also fixes LOTS of other issues.
I am on Vista Business with 1,8GhZ and 1 GB Ram on an older Mainboard ( Socket A / AMD ).
So on modern machines I would expect drastic changes :-)

I would check out what they mention in this thread: http://help.lockergnome.com/vista/Windows-Vista-Constantly-Hard-disk-ftopict65985.html

Basically it is SuperFetch (a service) that prefetches tons of files all the time. Turning that off fixes a lot…