Windows 7 is slooowing dooown

Puffi · Post by **Puffi** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 5:32 am

For all you fans of Windows troubleshooting, here's a gift for you:

I got a new HDD (Hitachi Travelstar 7k500) for my laptop (Asus N71VN), and replaced the boot drive with it (the laptop has two HDD's). I installed Windows 7 (x64). Now everything's slower. The laptop seems to be constantly working on something.

I looked at the processes on task manager and I have about 50% more processes now than I did on my previous installation of the same OS, with the same programs. Most of the new processes are svchost.exe and there are probably a few others. I think I only had 1 or 2 svchost.exes on my previous installation, now I have 10. Why would I have more now?? They also use some CPU. Taskmgr.exe uses even more. On the previous installation it didn't use any. I was hovering around 0-1% idle CPU use before, now it's at 5-12%.

I scanned the computer with Spybot and Hijackthis. Couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. They should be legitimate processes, running from the right locations. It's like my processor is constantly throttled down. I also experience small delays when I try to do some things, like it's struggling to find CPU power to do the simplest tasks.

Or maybe it's the new HDD, and it can't write to it fast enough or something? Speedfan says it's fine and the Windows performance test rates it at 5.9 so it can't be too badly broken at least.

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 5:46 am

You need to disable a couple of things to stop windows choking to death.

Go to control panel, change it to the classic view (small icons on the right side I think). then Administrative Tools, then Services, then disable (not stop) "Superfetch". Optionally you can also disable the Indexing service (done per drive), right click on the drive, and untick "allow indexing........", restart the machine, it should be faster and mess around with itself less.

I would also suggest disabling automatic updates, and Windows defender.

FYI Vista and W7 have more SVCHOSTS than XP, and the AMD64 versions have more still.

Andy

swivelguy2 · Post by **swivelguy2** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 5:59 am

What's on the other hard disk, and was it present when you installed windows? In my experience, you can only trust windows to install itself properly if there's only 1 HDD in the system during installation.

Puffi · Post by **Puffi** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 7:12 am

andyb: I've tried disabling superfetch and literally everything I possibly can while still keeping this thing running normally, except Windows Update, because I want to keep it. But all this is irrelevant anyway because I didn't do this with the previous Windows that worked fine.

swivelguy2: Could installing Windows with the other drive attached really be the cause of this? If so, WHY? I've had some problems with that before, but I've always been able to fix them. Also, if I disconnect the other drive and reinstall Windows, is it possible that these problems will come back after I reconnect it? I can't format that drive!

xan_user · Post by **xan_user** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 8:50 am

-looks like laptop is 1.5 sata and hdd is 3.0 sata...

bios update? and or asus sata ahci driver?

what does hdtune report?
and what does the w7 resource monitor show under cpu and disk use tabs?

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 6:56 pm

SATA 3 is backwards compatible AFATIK, and besides, I don't think there are any 2.5" 7K500 SATA 3 HDD's out yet.

I did a fresh W7-64 install today, it uses 450 MB RAM and have 32 processes running.

Remove the second HDD and see if that changes something, not that I think so, but it's very easy to do compared to everything else..

Next thing to try is to install 32-bit on the new HDD, if that works well then there must be something in your computer that doesn't play nice with 64-bit Windows/drivers.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Sun Mar 28, 2010 5:50 pm

You know what?

I am a Norton guy again. Long ago in windows 3.11s years, I found the continued joy in norton utilities for speeding things up. I can say that the antivirus + utilities on windows 7-64 bit pro is a great thing.

It has a simple little selector that can run your services: Full, Optimal, Minimal. Minimal is what I have it set to and it changes many services. I still have Aero and aero peek, but it clears out the rest of the unneeded. the virus program doesnt make a dent in performance it seems, and is very small in ram size.

I am quite happy with win7. It is superior to xp for most things and is more stable.

colm · Post by **colm** » Tue Mar 30, 2010 8:30 pm

my vista did this...
I associated it with graphics problems, when windows 7 calmed way down, fast boot, and acknowledged dx10.1 by default.

A hard drive not paired exactly is not likable by any windows, as I have come to learn. In fact I run twins to this day for that reason.