One of my biggest frustrations with Vista, at least initially on my 2-year-old desktop, was the incessant disk thrashing. The computer sits in the corner of our living room (it’s a small condo, so it’s basically all living room…), and the hard drive is not exactly quiet while under load. Every night, after about five minutes of idle time, the disk would grind away endlessly for hours at a time. I have a ton of mp3s and videos, so I assumed that eventually Vista would index everything and it would settle down. It never did, so I went on an adventure of shutting down every possible service to see what was causing the disk thrashing.

Eventually, I found it. If you’re suffering this problem, change the frequency of index updates and it should settle down:

• Open “Power Options”
• Click “Change plan settings” for your currently selected power plan (if I try really hard, I can almost imagine why this is under Power Settings. Almost.)
• Click “Change advanced power settings”
• Find “Searching and Indexing”, then “Power Savings Mode” in the tree
• Change the setting to “Balanced”

That should help. Good luck.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.