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re: Question about 'Stop Windows from Wildly Accessing your Hard Disk'
Sunday, December 12, 2004 at 12:53 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Clifford Keele
(1 messages posted)
The problem is that most Windoze programmers consider computers to have infinite
resources.
And, if the current generation of computers can't do what they need, they just expect
the next generation to do it.
Look at the last 20 years of PC evolution.
- Timex Sinclair - 4K Mem, no HDD, No FDD
- Apple II - 64K Mem, no HDD, 360K FDD
- IBM PCXT - Max 640K Mem, 10 MB HDD, 4.77 MHZ Proc (8 bit)
- IBM PCAT - (generally used 640 K Mem, 40 MB HDD, ? Proc (16 bit)
- 386 - (often 640K Mem, 80 MB HDD, 20 or 25 MHZ
- 486 - Perhaps 16 MB Mem, 100 MB HDD, 40 or 50 MHZ
- Pentium - 32 MB RAM, 2 GB HDD, 75-150 MHZ
- PII - 64 MB RAM, 4 GB HDD, 233 - 400 MHZ
- PIII - 128 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD, 500 - 1000 MHZ
- P4 - 512 - 1 GB RAM, 80 GB - 200 GB HDD, 1.5 - 3.6 GHZ (32 bit)
- Memory requirements are over 10,000 times that of the Apple II.
- HDD requirements are about 10,000 times that of the PCXT
- Processor speeds are about 4,000 times that of the PCXT
I believe that many software manufacturers have discovered that once computers no
longer perform as they should, they are upgraded, and many software programs are
upgraded at the same time. Thus for large companies like Microsoft, there are HUGE
benefits to making old computers run inefficiently.
Yes, the occasional flickering of a hard drive is benign.
However, constant HDD access can slow down the performance of the whole machine.
It also could be a sign of much large problems with the system overall including
possible virus attacks.
My company schedules “McAfee SCAN32” to run at odd times during the workday, and
when it comes on, things definitely start slowing down. On my laptop, it takes nearly
a full day for the process to finish due to a slow HDD.
I have another PIII-800 computer that was returned to me. It should be fine for
general E-Mail and etc. Except that it is running an older 4.2K HDD that is dragging
the whole system to a halt. I am now curious what putting on a Western Digital Raptor
HDD (10K SATA) would do for the overall performance of the system.
Some of the heaviest HDD access on my laptop have been from:
- SCAN32 (McAfee full HDD scan, scheduled periodically)
- Network Associates McAfee in General
- Computer Associates Software Delivery Software
- VSMON (Zone Alarm… seems to access much more than it should be doing)
- CVPND (Cisco VPN. Also access lots of stuff on the HDD)
My experience has been that McAfee is one of the most resource intensive antivirus
programs.
You might check out some of these utilities to monitor activities on your PC:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml
- Filemon - Very good FREE monitor of HDD activity
- TCPView - Trying this out, looks useful for TCPIP monitoring
- TDIMON - Also seems to have good TCPIP monitoring info
- PMON - Supposed to have process spawning monitoring. It doesn’t seem to want
to run under XP.
Overall, it is hard for me to estimate the cost of hackers, viruses, spyware and
etc. My experience is that on older computers (PII and PIII), the Antivirus programs,
firewalls, registry monitors, and anti-spyware utilities can be sucking down OVER
HALF of the machine’s resources, perhaps even more, and McAfee is THE WORST at doing
this.
---- Clifford ----
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 | | | |  | re: Question about 'Stop Windows from Wildly Accessing your Hard Disk' (Clifford Keele: Sun, Dec 12, 2004, 12:53 pm) |
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