For our second edition of the “Saturday evening post,” consider the case of an old Compaq Presario desktop with Vista that was running painfully slowly. Every time it came out of suspend mode, the hard drive would spin and spin and spin. What on earth could it be doing? Task Manager showed lsass.exe doing a lot of reads and writes, but everything uses that system service. CPU usage was minimal, and AVG was not doing a scan.
I thought I might need to defragment the hard drive so I opened the Tools menu in Windows Explorer only to find that Scheduled Defrag was enabled to run EVERY DAY and anytime on wake-up if the previous run was missed. Those must have been default settings as I certainly don’t remember setting them, but my other Vista machines have not been that obnoxious.
The computer gets less than an hour of use per day and defrag takes a while, so basically it would never finish, leading to the ever-spinning disk.
Now that I’ve disabled the daily defrag, it runs a lot faster and quieter. I also ran CCleaner to remove temp files and installed Google Chrome, and my wife will now be able to check her Gmail just seconds after wake-up.
I wonder what people did on Saturdays before there were computers to fix?
