Hard drives on desktops struggling to keep up

[Mark]

Just for kicks, I am trying the old (which I used to consider annoying) Disk Cleanup utility.  Apparently, I'll free 15GB!  I did notice a Local Settings folder that was 2.5 GB so, I will report back after I run this and sleep through a few reboots.  I think the "slow" complaint is only during first boot & reboot (but not log off & logon) which also has me thinking about wiping cobwebs off some group policies.

Can't remember if I mentioned this already, but I did defrag all of the workstations a few weekends ago.

[Jeff Zylstra]

Just for kicks, I am trying the old (which I used to consider annoying) Disk Cleanup utility.  Apparently, I'll free 15GB!  I did notice a Local Settings folder that was 2.5 GB so, I will report back after I run this and sleep through a few reboots.  I think the "slow" complaint is only during first boot & reboot (but not log off & logon) which also has me thinking about wiping cobwebs off some group policies.

Can't remember if I mentioned this already, but I did defrag all of the workstations a few weekends ago.

I still set my workstations to defrag at least every other month.  I wrote a batch file the uses the cleanmgr program in windows, then runs the defrag program in sequence. 

I highly recommend that you use the sageset and sagerun commands with cleanmgr so that you can bypass the file compression routines for "seldom used" files.  That routine seems to take the biggest problem with the windows disk cleanup program.

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

My WD Black drive was recently acting up - very slow.  this was on a Win7 system - turns out one of the Windows "recommended" updates did something.  I pulled off 3-4 updates and it was pretty much back to normal.

[Mark]

Interesting.

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

I suspect it was this one precisely...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018

[Mark]

I suspect it was this one precisely...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018

That's interesting and makes perfect sense to me why it may cause issues.  I'm bookmarking this one in case I run into it.

Thanks!

[Jeff Golas]

Things I've tried:

Run Defrag but only after turning off the page file and rebooting first

Cleaning out or just flat out replacing the users's profile - mad amounts of cached installer files in addition to Java, Flash caches, etc. Those can number in the thousands and while they may be 20mb, 4000 files copying takes time no matter what.

Re-imaging. This works 50-50..its seems something with the patches does weigh down the PC but overall in most cases it does buy back some performance.

Laptops - checking event logs, some of the built-in laptop software often conflicts with updates. In some cases stopping/disabling a service will REALLY wake up a laptop.

Increasing ram to 3+ gigs - this definitely helps but again, sometimes only so much.

[Gene Foraker]

How large is your pagefile?

It sounds like it is doing a a lot of caching on the HD.

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm