Hard drive thrashing - Windows XP Home

[Gas Bag]

I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.
I recently followed these instructions:

http://bucarotechelp.com/computers/windowsts/95021801.asp

But still this problem of thrashing continues. It's got so bad my
system freezes (or comes very close to it). Please help!

[Franco Leuzzi [MVP]]

"Gas Bag" ha scritto nel messaggio

Post by Gas Bag
I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.
http://bucarotechelp.com/computers/windowsts/95021801.asp
But still this problem of thrashing continues. It's got so bad my
system freezes (or comes very close to it). Please help!

Sorry.
This is an Italian NG.
Best regards.

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

(Italian 'group removed)

In message

Post by Gas Bag
I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad

Where are your swap file and Temporary Internet files (C: or D:)?

How much RAM does the system have?

Post by Gas Bag
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and

What does process explorer - or the Processes tab in task manager (click
twice on the CPU column heading) say is using the majority of processor
time when this happens?

Post by Gas Bag
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.
http://bucarotechelp.com/computers/windowsts/95021801.asp

Thanks - much useful stuff there; I don't think I learnt anything new,
but it's a useful collection all in one place (well, 7 places).

Post by Gas Bag
But still this problem of thrashing continues. It's got so bad my
system freezes (or comes very close to it). Please help!

My _guess_ would be insufficient RAM.

[Steve Hayes]

Post by Gas Bag
I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.

I had a similar problem, using Firefox. I frequently had to switch the power
off to stop it.

I took the cause of the problem to be the automatic updates of programs,
including the browser, which consumed more and more resources until the
machine was doing nothing but swapping stuff to disk.

The machine was stolen a couple of weeks ago (I was thinking of replacing it
anyway) and the new one has Windows 7, which boots in 1 minute instead of 25
minutes, and shuts down in 1 minute instead of 7 minutes, so there's an
improvement. It also has 2 Gigs of memory instead of 250 Mb.

[Bill Baka]

Post by Gas Bag
I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB. I have the most horrendous case of hard
drive thrashing that I've ever come across. It's particularly bad
whenever I open up an Internet Explorer 8 webpage, even if that page
is simply sitting idle. I confirmed this when I downloaded and ran
"Process Explorer". I don't have Norton installed on my system, and
I've defragged both my C: and D: Drives, as well as cleaning out all
temp folders.
http://bucarotechelp.com/computers/windowsts/95021801.asp
But still this problem of thrashing continues. It's got so bad my
system freezes (or comes very close to it). Please help!

It sounds like disk doctor program is in order to defrag you system.
There is actually a defrag built into Windows 7 but I haven't used it yet.