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After upgrading to Vista, you may hear your hard-drive "churning" a lot. This should settled down after a few days. See:

Find out why your hard disk is blinky all the time
http://www.shahine.com/omar/FindOutWhyY ... eTime.aspx

Mike Fullerton's blog - WTF is my @#$% machine doing!? How to figure this out
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/2007/ ... s+Out.aspx

Over to you, Bill & Walter...

My only immediate comment is not to be too XP-centric in your thinking. Under XP this disk churning would likely be sourced to search indexing of your hard drive.

If you note the shown results in both of Robear Dyer's links above, this is not even close to the truth.

Things you can do:

Right click each drive in My Computer, Properties, and decide what folders you do want indexed; and those you do not.

Remember that Vista is very happy to create a local workstation index of all of your network shares. This needs to be controlled by you.

Remember that Vista in a Network setting, Domain or Workgroup, is more than happy to make available "offline" any active shares you have. This needs to be controlled by you.

Memory management choices are important. Vista does not use physical RAM or Virtual Memory (the pagefile) anything like Windows XP. You can expect as a Vista trait more intensive use of the pagefile. There are benefits from using ReadyBoost that cannot be achieved with additional physical RAM, or pagefile sizing.

<~PAB wuz here>

Tip for beginners. To deselect, say D: drive, so that it won't be indexed, a window pops up named "Applying Tributes..." It's a bit disconcerting because it runs through all the files and folders on D for which it took about 30+ mins. It got hung up on dozens of files so I opted "Ignore all" and then it continued applying.... In other words, don't leave it unattended and expect to come back and it'll be done. I then did the same for my USB G drive. I use FileLocator Pro for those two hard drives.

Kerry

At the recent Summit I learned that Vista's Indexing should not cause this kind of disk thrashing.

It does take a good while to work, does start immediately and does not wait 48 hours to run as many have thought myself included. But, it will stand aside any time one is using the computer and is not supposed to ever use 100% of the CPU.

There are about 6 applications including Adobe 6 that will conflict with the Indexer that CAN cause just this type of thrashing. I do not know what the other 5 are, but after reading Robear's links I suspect eTrust is one of them. Everything going on at once just after boot can't be helpful either.

It is also important on an Upgrade to use the Windows Upgrade Adviser and remove those programs that it tells you to and reinstall them after the Upgrade. This will help to reduce the number of compatibility issues.

Gary, do you have any more of the list that isn't NDA?

No, they didn't give us any others. Just said there were 6 in total that they knew caused this specific issue.

I asked that a KB be written and they said they would look into it. I suspect the use of specific application names will be problematic.

Usual practice would be to list the specific applications - but only in the non-public Partners Knowledge Base to which you and I have access.

Of course, this doesn't mean we could disclose them - but we could at least see them.

I was hoping in a post like this people would come up with at least good candidates so we could accumulate those that seem to cause the problem. So far Robear's links have provided the one possible candidate. It would be nice to know the other 5. It sure could help some new Vista users.

I can vouch that several Adobe files caused a hang during "Applying Tributes..." in my D drive.

Kerry

<cough>Google Desktop Search</cough>

There is a common API used to search PDF files -- used by Google Desktop Search, Yahoo and others, including the original release of Micorosoft Desktop Search. (The APIs are from Adobe).

It used to be ZIP folders, and media files that one was concerned with. PDFs are at the moment known killers.

(Vista does not use the APIs, nor anymore does the latest version of Micrososoft Desktop Search for XP).