[$tinkle]

(running XP)

i'm running it as a last ditch to stop the massive paging for no apparent reason. i don't have any malware, i'm up-to-date on WU, i have plenty of computing horsepower, and no particular app clogs up the pipes (sorting taskman by cpu usage).

it seems that my cache keeps faulting & so the disk is getting hammered for simple tasks.

 

[johnbryanpeters]

What do you mean by "cache keeps faulting?" Do you mean page faults? At what rate? Is it continuous or intermittent?

And why in the world would you expect chkdsk to do anything about it? It logical integrity of the file system. That would have exactly nothing to do with page faults.

BTW: Your writing is almost as hard to decipher as PSP's.

 

[$tinkle]

pages stored on cache; pages fault; re-retrieve them from disk, defeating the purpose of cache. happens pretty much a lot. so much so that i notice.

i expect chkdsk to do what it advertises: repair/remove bad sectors so that schyte doesn't get retrieved from disk as frequently.

which psp? paintshop pro or the handheld thingie?

 

[johnbryanpeters]

Pinkshirtphotos.

Page faulting is a perfectly normal process; it's part of the guts of virtual memory management. Exactly what got you started on this line of investigation, are you hearing the disk make noise? Have you used perfmon to measure the behavior?

High page fault rates are more liable to be due to not enough memory than what you're hypothesizing.

 

[narlus]

running chkdsk on my drive that had bad sectors made it unreadable.

 

[syadasti]

running chkdsk on my drive that had bad sectors made it unreadable.

chkdsk works fine a majority of the time. I've used it to recover plenty of hard drive corruptions.

$tinkle - try setting your virtual memory to a static value (min/max are the same). You can turn off the indexing service your HDD - right click on the drive and uncheck the box. You can turn-off System Restore under System and disable the service too. Lastly, how fragmented is your HDD?

 

[nmr8]

fragmentation and bad sectors, wouldn't affect cache performance. i'd bet dollars to donuts your problem is either with the indexing service or a p2p program running in the background. these kinds of apps don't have a big memory footprint but their working set can be HUGE. for me edonkey would always, no matter how little data it was receiving, cause windows to page every other piece of memory to disk.

 

[syadasti]

fragmentation and bad sectors, wouldn't affect cache performance. i'd bet dollars to donuts your problem is either with the indexing service or a p2p program running in the background. these kinds of apps don't have a big memory footprint but their working set can be HUGE. for me edonkey would always, no matter how little data it was receiving, cause windows to page every other piece of memory to disk.

I was comment on narlus comment about chkdsk - its still a useful a majority of the time for bad sectors.

I know not all those things relate to cache performance but they can still speed up XP.

Another few are turning off sounds and turning off visual effects under system>advanced

 

[$tinkle]

Page faulting is a perfectly normal process; it's part of the guts of virtual memory management. Exactly what got you started on this line of investigation, are you hearing the disk make noise? Have you used perfmon to measure the behavior?

while page faulting is normal, it shouldn't be swapping what seems to be every requested block of memory. of course, i exaggerate slightly, but it's been slowly getting its creep on without any additional applications bolted on. something is taking priority in cache, so while increasing my vmem may treat the symptom, i'm beginning to suspect there's something else corrupted. of course, i've been watching my performance through the various tabs on taskman, and all processes check out.

You can turn off the indexing service your HDD - right click on the drive and uncheck the box. You can turn-off System Restore under System and disable the service too.

ummm...seems a little risky, no? is this something i should benefit from? if so, why?

Lastly, how fragmented is your HDD?

 

[$tinkle]

funny story: i was having some other kind of unidentified problem, and starting killing things in taskman.

"svchost.exe? why do i need all 5 of these?"
<delete, delete, delete, delete>


<--- "oh."

 

[binary visions]

How's your memory usage in the performance monitor?

I can't imagine chkdsk would do anything to improve your virtual memory performance. I guess if Windows was constantly writing virtual memory to bad blocks and then having to recover...

Have you checked all the programs that are loading at startup? Does anything funny show up in process manager as consuming a lot of memory? Or DO you have plenty of memory available and it's still paging?

 

[$tinkle]

by "checking all programs that load on startup", i have determined this through msconfig, the startup folder, and visually through taskmanager.

i set my vm statically as syadasti suggested (3G).

here's a snapshot helping to answer your mem question, even after the ~10 bootup/init:

but i seem to have an unrelated & additional problem: my touchpad is collapsing onto the frame, rendering it extremely sensitive to any nearby pressure, & therefore won't respond at times.

time for a new laptop.

 

[binary visions]

Hmm, plenty of free memory. Does it always register that much memory free, even when it's going through a disk-thrashing swap file seizure?

Get 3-4gb in the new laptop, it's really not worth doing anything else now. RAM is cheap.

 

[$tinkle]

Does it always register that much memory free, even when it's going through a disk-thrashing swap file seizure?

that's the thing, it looks like it has plenty of resources

Get 3-4gb in the new laptop, it's really not worth doing anything else now. RAM is cheap.

noted.

 

[SkaredShtles]

You might try downloading "Process Explorer" to see if it sheds any additional light on the problem...

 

[syadasti]

You can take apart the laptop and slip a piece of paper in there if its a metal contacts cursor jump issue from chassis flex/wear and tear

Turning of index only has the negative that file searches will take longer but if you don't search your HDD often that is a moot point. If you google it you will find numerous articles, here is the first result:

http://lifehacker.com/software/optimization/turn-off-indexing-and-speed-up-windows-xp-031440.php

System restore being turned off can be a risk if you often restore your disk to a prior configuration but if you know what you are doing you probably don't really need that feature anyways.