Disk defrag very slow

I have an Acer laptop, equipped with 4 GB of RAM, an Intel T2300 processor, and a 320 GB hard disk, running Windows XP Home SP3.

As of late, anything that produces heavy disk activity such as running Auslogics Disk Defrag or doing a backup with Norton Ghost takes considerably longer than before. For Auslogics Disk Defrag, this means that at just 1% fragmentation and using the "Defrag and Optimize" option, the defragmentation of the approx. 200 GB of data contained on the 320 GB disk took more than 12 hours.

Neither NIS 2012 nor MBAM nor Spybot Search & Destroy have been able to identify any critters that might have made it onto my system.

What I have found, though, is that there are considerable drops in the disk's transfer rate at certain points, even though I performed the respective test with HD Tune while virtually everything else had been terminated.

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Even though the transfer rate is overall pretty good, the drop to a mere 2.0 MB/sec in between might be the culprit.
Is this an early indication of the disk's end of life?

I'm somewhat at a loss right now and not sure if I may be barking up the wrong tree…

Let's have a look at what else may be running in the background.

Please consider running this simple utility that will help you get control of programs and processes that you wish to have running active, or not.

CodeStuff-Starters
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/Starter.html

Download and install, agreeing to the licensing terms and allow to install with all of the default settings as preselected in the installation wizard.

When you finally allow CodeStuff-Starters to run
It will preselect StartUps Tab -

• Click on File
• Select - save as .HTML (name the report file - Startups 08 26 2012.html

Right-click on Startups 08 26 2012.html
Select – Send To – Compressed (zipped) folder

Please post Startups 08 26 2012.html in your next reply
In your next reply, post the file as an attached file (use browse and upload buttons – at the bottom-right corner of your topic posting window where you are typing your next reply)

Please do not make any changes with Code-Stuff Starters, until after you post the requested information above and receive recommendations from a helper here.

Best Regards

Thank you very much for looking into this. Here is the CodeStuff Starters output. One more thing that I noticed after this morning's reboot is that while in the past less than 1 GB of memory were listed in the Task Manager under "PF Usage" right after the startup of all configured, now more than 1,2 GB are in use. I don't recall adding anything to the startups. Could some recent updates be gobbling up this much more memory from the get go?

Hi Don't Spam ME, You do have several "background running" applications and some "background running" updaters, plus maybe some applications that don't need to be loaded actively. Having both FileHippo and Secunia running active may be seriously redundant. Both are fine services, but both do gobble resources. Do you really need Logmein running? Probably not consuming much, but unless you are presently allowing a Remote User/Helper to view your machine, I see no use for it to be active. That said, I do have a couple dozen local technically challenged customers who keep their instance of logmein running active, because they regularly encounter situations in which they need coaching with an application, or just to get something fixed. Not having to turn on their Logmein, allows them to simply place a phone call, and we are up and running. If that doesn't describe you. Turn it off. Norton Ghost running active? Really? I use one of Norton's competitors, Acronis, but I never leave it running in the background, nor even as scheduled for periodic .iso backup. Instead, I run it manually as needed. ERUNT autoback.exe… Again, Really? Maybe it you are installing and uninstalling applications and games and similar, or are frequently experiencing system failures which demand your abiity to roll back to a previous restore point. But then you also have System Restore, and your saved .iso images for that. Those that are serious users of ERUNT may have other valid arguments about keeping it in play, and may know that it consumes very little, except maybe at StartUp, but do you need it automatically? Your choice. Power Management and Wireless configuration are two features that I set and forget, until I may have a purpose to make changes. I don't see a need to have these features running. Same with Realtek HD Audio Control Panel. I set it and don't often need to adjust it. CCleaner running active? Why? It's a great utility. I use it as needed. AppleSyncNotifier… Yeah, well maybe I'm out of touch or don't use my machine regularly for entertainment, but this one is probably grabbing some cycles that could be slowing you down. Same with Miranda IM. PamelaPCR - Again, I am not a user, but unless you are constantly on SKYPE and always record your calls, why have it running? Instead, start it up as needed. OpenDNS updater? I current run my network via OpenDNS and love it. But I don't use the extra tools. DR Watson? I've benefited from using DR Watson maybe once or twice in twenty years. Perhaps the most Important feature in your StartUps, is one that doesn't seem to be there??? What Antivirus are you running? ________________________________ The fortunate aspect of MSCONFIG or CodeStuff Starters is that you can experiment. For instance, I see nothing in the StartUp list you have posted that is "required". Disabling most or all of them could save the system resources. If you find that disabling a feature "breaks" an important application you use regularly, you can turn it back on by enabling again. Consider disabling all of the items appearing in your CodeStuff Starters report. Or just disable half of them at a time. Run your Defrag utility, and watch for improvement. ________________________________ If the above exercise does not lead to improved result, then we can have a look other possibilities.

Please note that I am NOT experiencing performance problems with my computer other than in the specific situation of applications that produce high volumes of disk I/O. As such, I did not expect any of the various applications that I am starting automatically to be the culprit what to me looks more like a disk-related issue than anything else.

Thanks for the FileHippo and Secunia reminder. I had meant to turn off Secunia, since it gobbles up a lot of resources off and on ever since the upgrade to 3.0.

Since I am self-employed and working from a home office and at times need to look things up on my computer and/or send things out to clients while I am not at the office, I keep LogMeIn running for easy access from any smartphone, tablet or other computer (preferably one under my control, though, given the security implications of such remote access).

As far as Norton Ghost is concerned, I have lost too many of my work results to crashed hard disks to not use a Ghost (or a similar product like Acronis TrueImage) every night. That way, I can rebuild my computer on a new disk within hours and at most have lost that day's work results.

ERUNT only minimally delays the boot process, but makes sure that I have copies of my registry, just in case

Power Management and Wireless config were still in there from a time when I took the laptop on the road more often and was fiddling around with the settings. No longer need to run 24/7.

Thanks for the Realtek HD Audio Control Panel reminder.

CCleaner caters to my laziness by automatically cleaning out temp files and browser cache upon startup. Generates a bit of a performance penalty immediately after login, but terminates once it is done, leaving zero further impact at that point.

AppleSyncNotifier… Yeah, well as an iPhone and iPad user, it has its benefits, from what I understand. If I were only using iTunes, that would be a different story, though, admittedly since Apple still installs and starts it by default, too.

Since I'm working from home and like to be available to my clients, Miranda IM strikes me as the best solution for IM availability via the standard platforms without incurring the performance impact generated by running separate IM clients for each platform.

I'm running OpenDNS updater in order to keep this network linked to my OpenDNS account. My understanding is that neither the statistics function nor the Malware/Botnet Detection feature will be able to properly inform me upon login to the OpenDNS site since the network name is linked to an IP address which sporadically is changed by my ISP? With the OpenDNS updater running, the OpenDNS server is alerted to the change of IP and continues the tracking of my net despite the IP change.

Not sure where DR Watson snuck in from.

In any case, I am attaching another ZIP file containing the following:

• A new copy of the Startups output
• An HD Tune benchmark from shortly after removing the startup entries and rebooting (terrible throughput)
• An HD Tune benchmark from a few minutes later (similar throughput pattern as in my very first message)
• A screen capture of disk-related event log entiries (all pointing to one of the external drives, if I see this correctly)
• An HD Tune benchmark from after disconnecting all four external USB-connected disks
• A Disk Defrag screenshot showing a dramatic decrease in throughput once it comes to optimizing / moving system files to the beginning of the disk
• Same as above, about half an hour later (very little progress)

Even during the defragmentation portion of the defrag & optimize, there was a clear slowdown in performance in areas of the disk that seemed to coincide with those areas that showed drops in throughput in HD Tune. Where in other areas 400,000 blocks were read in a matter of seconds, in those "dubious" areas, reading a mere 4000 blocks took considerably longer.

Since it is clear at this point that the behavior of Auslogics Disk Defrag is the same even without those additional startup entries, I will interupt the defragmentation and hope that we will be able to look at some other potential culprits. If need be, I can use HD Tune or the SeaTools to perform an in-depth error check on the disk. A quick check did not reveal any errors.

just out of curiosity, had a quick scan through the topic but didn't see if you've mentioned it, exactly how much free space is left on your hard drive? things do slow down a lot when the drive is at or near max data storage capacity and why i think it's always recommended to have at least 15% free space on any drive, so if you have over 270GB of data on it then i'd expect things to start slowing down at times while it's trying to find empty space to move temp data around on it.

Thanks for the suggestion, but at present only 61% of the disk space are in use. With 39% of free space, this shouldn't be an issue, right? I also performed an error scan with HD Tune last night, but it did not detect any damaged blocks. That said, at some spots that seem to coincide with those drops in the HD Tune performance chart, the scanning speed of HD Tune broke in considerably only to recover to its regular speed shortly after passing each respective spot. For good measure, I am including HT Tune benchmark screenshots from before and after running the error scan.

For comparison, I am attaching screenshots of HT Tune benchmarks I did over the weekend of three of my external (USB-connected) HDDs. As you can see, one of them displays a throughput profile that is very similar to that of my internal HDD. Said external one is the only one that seems to be on its last leg, given the frequent clicking noise it is producing (something the predecessors of my other external HDDs used to do, too, before they went completely south and required (warranty) replacement. That's why I can't help but wonder if the behavior of my internal disk that I am observing might just be an indication of similar end-of-life characteristics. But before biting the bullet and replacing it more or less on a whim, I would prefer to be sure.

The earlier stated Stop Error may be related to read/writes to Paging (swap file).
If correct, the problem could be related to software, or fragmentation of swap file, or even chipset.

While some defrag tools claim to defrag swap file, my opinion is that a good way to resolve the situation is to temporarily turn off Paging, reboot, and then set Paging manually at 1.5 - 3.0 times physical RAM. Then you would have swap file all in the same contiguous block. Windows does a pretty good job of managing paging, and experts debate whether or not Windows managed vs. manually set paging results in any performance improvement, but since you may be having a related problem you may benefit from considering a manual set.

Defragging also has difficulty with the sometimes large files of System Restore. If the machine is running well and has no malware infection, it is sensible to remove all but the most recent Restore Point, and even temporarily turn off System Restore to clear it out, then reboot, and then Create a fresh Restore Point. Windows arbitrarily sets System Restore to a fairly large size. I generally set System Restore to 1024mb or less on my C:\ drive only, and turn off System Restore on any other partitions.

As far as your intention to "be sure" before taking the step to replace the hard drive…
It may be better to be safe, than to be sure.

I am self-employed and working from a home office and at times need to look things up on my computer and/or send things out to clients while I am not at the office

My opinion is that the value of the saved information is vastly greater than the presently reasonable cost of hard drive memory.

Plus, by getting a new HD, you will have the ability to "verify" that your .iso backup is functionally competent.

Thanks for the kind reminders.

I had already used pagedefrag to eliminate (or at least reduce) fragmentation of the paging/swap file since I am not aware of any regular defrag tool being able to do so, despite claims to the contrary by their manufacturers.

To reduce problems with System Restore, I am regularly making sure that none of the external disks are included for the Restore Points, and I am also making sure that the slider for setting the size is at a reasonably low setting (typically at the 1% mark), instead of the rather high setting (quite often around 14%) that Windows seems to elect.

As far as large Restore Points are concerned, I cleaned them out recently by temporarily turning System Restore off and back on.

The only really large, actually huge files left belong to my email.

As far as your intention to "be sure" before taking the step to replace the hard drive… It may be better to be safe, than to be sure.
My opinion is that the value of the saved information is vastly greater than the presently reasonable cost of hard drive memory.

I hear you. Will have to get cracking at getting a new HDD and replacing the current one.

I have kept postponing this because of a planned migration towards Win 7 for this computer, but every time I gave it a shot, something else did not migrate properly. And an attempted in-place upgrade to Vista and then to Win 7 did not work, either. So it might be a bit longer that I'll be dealing with XP on this machine. So far, I haven't found a proper way of migrating all data to a/the new machine. Anything in the My Documents folder is a no-brainer. But when it comes to data stored by applications in custom locations (e.g. by Trillian, Miranda IM, PSI, Skype, Yahoo IM, MSN Messenger, AIM, etc.) those logged messages never seem to properly make it over to the new computer in any of my migration attempts. And the couple of times I tried my luck with PC Mover, the target system was rendered so unstable, it just wasn't worth it. But this whole migration thing would be a different thread anyway, so please forgive me for venting some of my frustration.

Hi Don't Spam ME,

Hi Don't Spam ME, I have an Acer One with new 320GB drive in it where I have a 30GB partition(FAT32) with just the fresh install(just finished) of XP Pro with all Patches and MS AntiVirus And it too has been defraging the partition (33% full/67% free) for 5 hours and is only 48% of the way through and claims 4 more to go. I wouldn't jump to the drive being defective yet but if you have the posibilty to put the drive in a 2nd system and defrag/run Diags. on it there that would be a good way to tell if it is the drve or an issue with the laptop. You mentioned that you have XP Pro is this the OS that came with it? if not you may need some Manufactures drivers for the chipset. -sometimes these drivers have to be installed on a fresh install Sorry about the empty reply hit tab.