Why I (still) curse Vista from time to time

In my last post I described how Vista had finally become tolerable for me thanks to four CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, and a fast RAID 0. Well, today I’m back on my old rig — two cores, 3.25GB of RAM (usable out of 4GB total…thanks a lot, Intel…NOT!), and a single disk -– as I wait for Dell to swap out my pre-production unit with one from their shipping inventory (always a good idea when there’s a formal review on the line).

Needless to say, the drop in performance is striking. Whereas with the M6400 I was able to spin up a good half-dozen virtual machines (8GB has its privileges), now I’m lucky if I can juggle two without having the system descend into a paging frenzy. Worse still, all of Vista’s most annoying behaviors seem that much more pronounced when you drop down a hardware level or two.

For example, last night I was trying to do network throughput measurements under VMware when -– tada! -– Vista decides to go on a “low priority” disk I/O binge. The culprit? Some kernel-mode Registry Backup process (RegBack?) decided to kick off in the middle of my test scenario, skewing the measurements (even “low” priority chews up CPU cycles) and leaving me cursing at the screen.

A quick check of the Vista Resource Monitor showed that the offending activity was indeed kernel-based (System), meaning there was no real way to turn it off by disabling a service or whatnot. Basically, I had to sit back and wait until Vista decided it was happy with my Registry’s backup status and gave me back my machine. You’d think Microsoft would be smart enough to do some sort of activity check (is the user working interactively at the console?) before firing off such a disk-intensive background task.

Of course, as soon as RegBack was finished, Vista decided it was time to index my hard disk. I had recently cleaned out my local Outlook PST file and Windows Search was now chomping at the bit to get at my mail store. Since I’d already waited for some time with the RegBack function, I decided enough was enough and tried to manually stop the Windows Search service.

I say “tried” to stop it because, even after the service had been officially shut down, the SearchIndexer process continued to run and generate disk I/O (this per the aforementioned Resource Monitor utility). Eventually, I took the brute-force approach and nuked the SearchIndex process from Task Manager. Finally, some peace. My HDD light was silent, my VMs fully responsive once again. After a moment or two of bliss, I decided to kick off my next test scenario.

And then it happened.

The HDD light came back to life. This time, it was Windows Defender generating the I/O. As I battled with the Services control panel applet to shut that puppy down, I noticed to my horror that SearchIndexer.exe was now back from the dead. For some unknown reason, Windows had decided that it should restart the Search service, and its greedy little underling –- SearchIndexer — was now gleefully chewing away at my mail store (and skewing my test results — again).

In the end, I re-re-stopped each of the services (and SuperFetch, which was now showing signs of wanting in on all that juicy disk I/O action) and then set their start types to “Disabled.” So far, this has kept them at bay –- though my dreams are now filled with images of out-of-control appliances chasing me through my house. Sort of like that dreadful “Maximum Overdrive” movie, but with Whirlpool and KitchenAid as the villains.

In summary: Windows Vista = Maximum Overdrive for your PC. It’s got a mind of its own, and sometimes the only way to pacify all that “evil alien energy” is to beat the OS into submission with Task Manager.