My machine is a Dell Dimension 9100, P4 Dual Core 2.8GHz with 1GB RAM and 160GB SATA Barracuda HD. FAAH works fine as does HPF2 and HPF before that. HDC seems to send the disk into a frenzy every 15 minutes or so and I can't understand why. For now, I'll just turn off HDC unless/until I hear the issue has been solved.

hmmmmm BlackSmurf68.....have you spoken to the consigliere of the tribe? Your spec machine should put these HDC thru like there's no tomorrow. U do not reveal which OS and which agent u use, UD or BOINC, but have experience with both on the same machine a p4 2.53 ghz, 1gb ddr. The fact that it in large volumes pushes out from ram (and maybe swapfile), to regular disk, or move large volume ram store to swapfile suggests that the disk settings in the OS might not be optimum. I've seen next to nothing, and certainly not heard anything of disk trashing.

1. Check if DMA of the Disk has been activated (see system control panel)
2. Check if there is enough space allowed for the swapfile to grow (same panel)
3. Check if there is any process that pushes the agent to reduce its ram use.....the Science will step aside if anything with higher than lowest priority demand ram.
4. Suggest a serious disk defrag....your swapfile might be in a hundred places if used with many 10000s files like a audio collection? There's a util "pagedefrag" for swapfiles to be put in a single space from Sysinternals (just bought by MSFT), that does the job during boot time.....can take 15/30 minutes, so dont take the 'every boot' option.

HDC goes thru a cycle of loading images increasing RAM use to about 280mb and swapfile to about also 280mb, then gradually reduces...you can see this in taskmanager. If u select the extra columns to display in taskmanager u'll discover a wealth of life information there. Observe the frenzy when your machine goes into this disk trashing.

Sorry, this is just my little client experience....u can always google the issue and seek for 'disc trnshing fix"

ciao

PS, i'm jealous of your disk...just got a 80gb ATA.

Edit: Sorry Lawrence for any duplication of your comments, i'm convinced these message servers are out of sync! The above i wrote in about 10 minutes, yet here is >30 minute gap between the 2. Oddly, when logging to forum, it goes sometimes to https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/.....forum/...., sometimes to www.world......../forum/....

Fragmentation can reduce even the fastest computer to a crawl.

Thing to do is run Windows Defrag in Analyse mode, and see how many fragment the pagefile is in. Also, use Task Manager to view the pagefault count for your processes, to see if the pagefile is being used more than is ideal.

If these test indicate a problem, then either use a third-party utility to sort things out, or use Windows Defrag and remember to recreate the pagefile in a contiguous space. Set the pagefile to a fixed size to prevent it from becoming fragmented again. I prefer to keep my pagefile on a seperate partition to make it easier to manage.

If all this still fails to help, then chances are your normal computer use is taking up more memory than average. Use Task Manager or System Monitor to keep a track of which processes are using a lot of memory. Memory loss can also be a symptom of spyware or virus activity. Practice safe computing.

Didactylos posted:

Early this morning I took Sekerob's advice and used the Sysinternals pagedefrag freeware utility at http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html

It worked great. For some reason, I stopped thinking about Sysinternals a year and a half ago, even though I keep their great book 'Windows Internals' in my bedroom.

One of my computers had been upgraded from 256 MB to 512 MB to 1 GB, producing 3 fragments for my pagefile. The other had been upgraded from 512 MB to 1 GB (-128 MB video) producing a pagefile with 2 fragments. Pagedefrag worked great on both. I will have to add this to 'Useful Utilities'. Remember to run chkdsk /F first.

Lawrence