Tuesday, June 08, 2010

How to stop Vista from trashing your disk

Ever notice how Vista churns your HDD? I had the misfortune of having to install Vista on a machine again and finally took the time to figure out what to do to make it stop. I knew about the first four, but the last two were new to me and made all the difference:
  1. Disable ReadyBoost
  2. Disable SuperFetch
  3. Disable the Windows Search service
  4. Disable the scheduled Disk Defragmentation task
  5. Disable the scheduled System Restore task (shows up as super-high System Volume Information traffic)
  6. Go into the registry and disable prefetching entirely.
All these steps removes 99% of the extra disk activity and now the disk doesn't rattle all the time :)