Stagletto

Hi all, havent posted fo a while but my laptop is causing me a little grief so here I am!

I have an Acer Travelmate 2312LM_L which no-one appears to know anything about. Its from the same family as the 2310 obviously (the BIOS recognises it as such) so most solutions for the 2310 would (i hope...) work on my one.

The problem is that it appears to access the HD randomly - this is backed up by a little snooping I did using the "Performance" tool in Administrative tools. With fan on or off the HD will randomly access and jump up to 100% Avg. Disk Queue Length. This also happens quite a lot when using the computer to do anything, like open a folder etc after you havent used it for a period of time.

Anyone got any ideas how to stop it doing this? Im positive it is what is causing the generally poor performance I experience with this machine - trying to play Red Alert 2 on it is rather annoying as it stops to access disk randomly during it... and hell, that's one OLD game that should have any problems running.

Thanks!

Stagletto

MORE : I should also point out that it is always at 100% CPU usage in TaskMan, even when it is idle and I am not doing anything with it!

EDIT 2 : Fixed this. Was the Belkin wireless software - removed it from startup and now its back down to a much more acceptable range of 0% to 25%

TheMatt

Is the hard disk usage still up? Have you defragged it anytime recently?

Stagletto

It still accesses the HD when its been idle for a bit and you select something. Will try a full defrag tonight and let you know who it gets on - it wasnt long ago that it had one but worth another try I guess...
Ta

Stagletto

Defrag has sped performance up quite a bit - RA2 is now playable thankfully, only the odd disk acess pause every now and then. No idea why it does this but it doesnt seem to affect it too bad now after a bit of registry tweaking, the CPU Usage decreased drastically (as in the posts above) and a defrag these access times are less frequent and for not as long.

For information the files that defrag went to work on were:

WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM (2 fragments, 7MB in size)
WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE (4 fragments, 21MB [!] in size)
WINDOWS\Prefetch\NTOSBOOT\B00DFAAD.pf (3 fragmentrs, 643KB in size)

Looks to me as though my system files were a bit fragmented which definitely wouldnt help matters. Things are running much better now, so if anyone experiences the same probs as me follow the above and you defintely see some improvement.

Just out of interest I ran Mobile Meter as per your sig - average temp for CPU is 62c, HD about 45c. Is this in the normal range?

Thanks again for your help!

Stagletto

laboye

I wonder how fragmented that drive was... Hmm...

TheMatt

If those temps for the CPU are under load, then they are fine, if they are idling, then they are OK (a little on the high side), but they could be lower. Is your Windows XP power setting on Home/Office Desk or Notebook/Laptop? You will see lower temps with the Notebook/Laptop settings, but gaming would take a small performance hit, so you could switch back to the Home/Office Desk profile when doing that. Generally, you will start to see some problems when the CPU goes above 70, and as it gets higher, you will see more and more problems such as crashing.

For cooling my Aspire (see My System), I use a Bytecc Cooling Pad and run the laptop with the bottom panels off. That way, the fans are blowing right on the CPU and chipset. I can run it with the Home/Office Desk Power scheme plus the overclock and game without difficulties. But I don't think you will have to do all of this, and even just getting a cooling pad will make a big difference.

Stagletto

Hey guys,

It still does the same thing, even now. Tries to access the HD every few mins, even not when gaming. I really am at my wits end, its not overheating, PerfMon appears to check out fine (apart form those horrible random HD spikes I mentioned before)....

Or Is it just a crap laptop? I could live with just knowing it was crap...

TheMatt

Defrag again and see what happens. To maintain a hard disk, you have to defrag it regularly. I generally do mine once a week since it is a slow hard disk, but you usually don't have to do it that often.

BTW, try using power defragmenter instead of the Windows utility. I use it instead of the Windows disk defragmenter. Do the PowerMode Defragmentation. It will run it in a Command Prompt window. It does a better job than the Windows defragmenter.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...agmenter.shtml

hwm54112

Defrag your pagefile as well (can't be done during a standard defrag because the file is in use)

Disable hibernation in control panel>power options (if you use hibernation)

Set virtual memory initial size to 0, set maximum size to 0- click set button then OK

Start>right click My Computer>properties>advanced tab>in the performance box>settings>advanced tab>virtual memory box

Turn off system restore

Reboot

Defrag drive- if your internet is cable or dsl-disconnect modem, disable antivirus software

Re-enable all of the above- set virtual memory initial and maximum size to 1.5 or 2 times physical memory

TheMatt

BTW, before you defrag, run the Disk Cleanup program. Be sure to compress old files, and clean out the recycle bin if you have a lot of stuff in there. CCleaner is also good to run.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

One thing to note, defragmenting will go better if you have more free disk space. Disabling hibernation as hwm54112 has suggested will free up a significant amount of disk space. Also, the general rule about the pagefile is that it should be about 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have, but if you have more than 1 GB of RAM, you can just set it to be 1 GB and that will be fine.

Stagletto

ok - will try all this! Have downloaded the defragger etc. Also bought myself a 160GB external drive to put most of my laptop files on... should hopefully reduce the amount of space being used (even though there is 4.91GB free on partition 1 of the drive, which is about 19GB in total)