The Vista Symphony- streaming to every single computer near you

If you're running Vista on a computer you use, especially a mobile computer like a notebook, then you've heard the Vista Symphony whether you realized it or not.  The Vista Symphony is that rhythmic melody played by your hard drive that is doing, well, who knows what even if your computer is sitting idle.  Call it the super-fetch, or pre-fetch, or post-fetch, whatever you want to call it but it rolls on no matter what.

This morning I decided to turn on all of the computers in Mobile Tech Manor so they could do any housekeeping that Vista likes to do so each one would be ready to go if I needed to use it.  I powered up all five notebooks in addition to the one I was using and just let them run sitting in the dock or standalone for those without docks.  I went about my business working on the Lenovo U110 and in a lull in my work I heard a hard disk humming along with activity.  It was actually louder than that and the reason soon became apparent as I looked around me.  The Vista Symphony was in full swing as three of the notebooks were spinning and accessing their hard drives in full force.  The three notebooks thrashing away are all running Vista and the other two were dead silent as one is running Windows XP and the other is a Mac.  Now, as I looked around and listened raptly to the Symphony I verified that none of the three singing computers was actually doing anything.  No programs were running, no updates were happening, nada.  They were just singing away to get a little attention, I guess.  The Vista Symphony was performing even though no one asked it to.  One of life's mysteries for sure.

Comments

[Badcam]

Sorry, did you say something? I couldn't hear with all that noise.

I agree about the disc thrash. Hasn't anyone actually come up yet with a definitive solution for that? Apart from installing XP of course ;-)

[James Kendrick]

Something with a fruit logo on it.

[Hepper]

they were probably indexing

[PJ]

I've been trying to figure that out by observing task manager, installing software that shows the hard drive activities, and just sitting there staring at the computer to see exactly what's causing all that noise. I guess I wasn't the only one who noticed that and will never really find out exactly what's going on inside of my computer that's making all that noise.. =D

[bmhome1]

My three Vista tablets randomly access the hard drive for about first 5 minutes on cold boot, along with 100% CPU during that period, then suddenly wildly swing CPU use for next minute and then sits idle with CPU from 10% - 40% peaks and ZERO hard drive access indicator. Left at idle indefinitely, hard drive led blinks on momentarily 2-3 intervals a minute. Nearly identical behaviour a well-tuned Vista compared to a well-tuned XP, except the cold boot extra few minutes to settle down. Such is the cost for Superfetch, paid back many times over in use.

If disk thrashing trade-off for indexing and auto-everything features are so bothersome, turn ALL of them and thrashing is GONE. Decide whether features causing disk thrashing are worth their cost and choose one or the other. Wanting both is not an option any OS on any platform yet can provide.

Vista does a very good job resuming from hibernation getting settled down around 1 minute fully idle, and is why I never cold boot unless forced to. Of course, from sleep readiness virtually instananeous is the smart choice with laptops plugged in.

Why all the cold bootings anyways?

[cr0ft]

You can get a fair amount of trashing on XP too. Just install Office 2007 and the required desktop search stuff that Outlook uses to index and search mail and hey presto, say hello to disk trashing as XP indexes everything on your hard drive... over and over again, apparently.

I don't think there is any mystery to why Vista trashes the disk. It indexes stuff continuously so the "instant" search crud will work.

Personally I went back to Outlook 2003 on XP at work. No disk trashing and the search function may take a lot longer but it actually searches everything - not just everything that was there during the last indexing.

[Scoopster]

I'm not a Mac owner, but I know that Macs index the HDD as well -- that's the spotlight magic search tool displaying the results of the indexing.

Most of us know that Macs do not do the disk symphony/thrashing routine the way Vista does. Anyone have an honest to goodness technical explanation why Macs can do it non-intrusively and Vista cannot? I'm not looking for OS-bashing...I'm actually asking if anyone knows.

Bmhome - I think the Mac indexing disproves your statement "Wanting both is not an option any OS on any platform yet can provide." Unless a serious Mac user can tell us all that Mac/Spotlight's indexing and search is far less detailed and rigorous compared to Vista / Windows Desktop Search.

Anyone running Google Desktop Search on an XP box? How does it compare thrashing-wise to Windows Desktop Search on XP or to Vista?

[bmhome1]

I recall when Spotlight launched there was concern about resources swallowed during initial indexing and terminal commands to reduce non-stop indexing of virtual drive files running. It wasn't disk activity as much as CPU usage. More a few decided Spotlight better turned off.

Macs don't have drive activity led's so there's less reminders to annoy PC users bugging out about drive access blinking.

Until hardware evolves orders of magnitude, indexing will "thrash" disks. If one buys into defragmenter design "featuring" backround processing, either the drive never stops blinking or it stopped working.

"Thrashing" is directly related to user choice of backround processes allowed to run. Kill off the features and hard drive becomes idle again. It's not rocket science or Vista as devil incarnate except recycled article fodder.

Wasn't the whole subject discussed into oblivion within past three months, and three months prior, and again before?

Put a piece of black tape over the drive led and marvel how fast you can find what once was lost instead.

Personally, all data on a D partition inside folders as created makes indexing irrelevant for anything imaginable stored on a tablet unless very disorganized or forgetful or both.

Even at 50GB most files get off-loaded to external drives to make room within a month. During that period I can locate anything within three nested folders faster than launching a search. Indexing for huge desktop databases makes sense. For laptops its just resource drag to blame Vista incapable of running.

Disable indexing, backround auto-everything and stare at drive led for 5 minutes to absorb how utterly simple the cause and effect: normal drive activity returns and a mystery never more.

Real mystery is how the Mac got back to purring along since its hardware/backup meltdown few weeks back. Either I missed followup story or if not, that's a topic worthy of address.

[Scoopster]

You mention "initial indexing" on Macs. That's not the issue. On Vista (or any OS and dataset) we all understand the *initial* index takes time and resources.

Now that I've been running my x61 for 4 months and it's well past the initial index, why is it that when I come back after being out of the office for a couple of hours, the HDD is in overdrive and sometimes it can take 30 seconds to bring up the login screen?

Macs don't do that - my business partner has owned several since Spotlight came out. Once a Mac's initial index is done, it runs beautifully while keeping an always-up-to-date index. Why can't Vista?

It's not about the LED...duh. I can hear my HDD spinning and I can feel the added heat on the palmrest and keyboard. The LED isn't the issue here; the issue is what the LED is representing.

I have 40GB of my 160GB HDD full of data and 15GB of mail in Outlook, both of which I use regularly, and 20GB of music. Not indexing and fast-searching is not an option for the data and mail.

Still hoping someone can compare other desktop search experiences on XP to Vista.

[Jake]

Don't forget that Windows Defender might be running on some of those PCs if they haven't been running for a few days. Also, Vista may not be indexing at startup but might be prefetching instead. Also, startup applications will cause the HDD to spin as the PC starts up.

I'm not sure what the big deal is here. When I start my PC it behaves the way bmhome1 described above: the disk spins for a couple of minutes at startup and then it quietens down. Unless you're moving lots of files or installing lots of apps there shouldn't be any need for Vista to keep indexing regularly. Also, these background tasks run as a low priority so they won't actually slow you down when you try to get some work done. If the PC is just sitting there doing nothing why not let it do some tidy-up.

Finally, if you want to see what these background tasks are doing, check in the performance and reliability tools rather than Task Manager as that will tell you exactly which services are accessing your disk.

If Macs were expected to cater for as many different needs as Windows I'm sure you'd find that they do similar things. Also, I think I'd prefer a little disk grinding now and then to the mooing that Mac owners had to put up with not long ago.

[kevin white]

I find my mac's lack of a disk access light unsettling, but I've gotten mostly used to it. The hard disk is actually louder than the rest of the computer so I can usually hear it.

I definitely can say that my mac does not thrash after being un-slept, but my vista laptop does.

Also, spotlight indexes the entire mac hard drive; Vista by default indexes only certain locations where user files are likely to be stored.

Spotlight indexing seems to happen on my Mac periodically, but it doesn't seem to slow anything down. Time Machine, however... that slows it down. Granted, I use a USB2 drive for Time Machine, so that's probably why it's slow... USB2 is famous for being a resource hog.

[James Kendrick]

When this symphony I described happened none of these machines had been recently cold booted. They had each been roused from Sleep or Hibernation several hours before the disk thrashing I describe took place. I'm aware of the cold boot Vista phenomenon which often renders a mobile device useless for a few minutes. This was not that case here.

[Bill]

Yeah the disk thashing is horrible with Vista. Why they cant come up with something like apple is beyond me. I was impressed with how quiet your Macbook destroyed all the data on it's hard drive, and apparently rendered your backup worthless as well. Vista would have probably thrashed the disk, or even asked permission before doing it. Another clever feature from curpentino!

[Marco]

HD trashing in Vista occurs only in notebook not in desktop (not on the ones that i have used), maybe it isa a problem with low speed HD?
On desktops you resume system and everyone is responsive and hd do not trash (not in a strange manner), but it is true that sometimes there is hd activity for no one reason.