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Hi everyone. I recently found this website from a post at Anandtech.com, and started following the Win XP tweak guide ("From reformat to relax" by Koroush Ghazi) on one of my computers.
I got to the HDD optimization on page 4 and followed the suggestion to uncheck the option to compress the hard drive and uncheck the option to index files. Windows then started the process to apply these changes, and the dialog box indicated that it would take about 20 hours to complete (!). So, I went to bed and allowed it to keep running overnight.
Today I woke up and found that the computer had restarted. It had only been about 7 hours since the process had started so I was surprised -- I expected to have about another 13 hours to go. I logged in and saw a balloon saying that an update had been applied automatically, and it had required an automatic restart of my computer.
The problem is that now my computer is excruciatingly slow. Every time I do anything it hangs for several seconds (20-30 seconds) before accessing the hard drive (the computer just sits there, the mouse pointer does not respond to mouse movements and the hard drive light is off). Then it "wakes up", continues doing whatever it was doing before it froze, works fine for a minute or so, and then it hangs again. This process repeats itself continuously.
I am not sure what could be causing it. My first guess is that the automatic update somehow interrupted the process to change the HDD compression and indexing settings, and it is somehow screwing with disk access. The other guess is that the disk overheated from so many hours of continuous work. I turned the computer off and will allow it to cool down all day today to see if it resolves the issue, but I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas as to what else might be causing this problem or how to resolve it.
Most of my data is backed up so I could, if necessary, just reformat and reinstall XP (or try repairing/installing without reformatting?) , but i'd rather avoid this for obvious reasons!
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: changed the subject title to make the content more obvious
I got to the HDD optimization on page 4 and followed the suggestion to uncheck the option to compress the hard drive and uncheck the option to index files. Windows then started the process to apply these changes, and the dialog box indicated that it would take about 20 hours to complete (!). So, I went to bed and allowed it to keep running overnight.
Today I woke up and found that the computer had restarted. It had only been about 7 hours since the process had started so I was surprised -- I expected to have about another 13 hours to go. I logged in and saw a balloon saying that an update had been applied automatically, and it had required an automatic restart of my computer.
The problem is that now my computer is excruciatingly slow. Every time I do anything it hangs for several seconds (20-30 seconds) before accessing the hard drive (the computer just sits there, the mouse pointer does not respond to mouse movements and the hard drive light is off). Then it "wakes up", continues doing whatever it was doing before it froze, works fine for a minute or so, and then it hangs again. This process repeats itself continuously.
I am not sure what could be causing it. My first guess is that the automatic update somehow interrupted the process to change the HDD compression and indexing settings, and it is somehow screwing with disk access. The other guess is that the disk overheated from so many hours of continuous work. I turned the computer off and will allow it to cool down all day today to see if it resolves the issue, but I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas as to what else might be causing this problem or how to resolve it.
Most of my data is backed up so I could, if necessary, just reformat and reinstall XP (or try repairing/installing without reformatting?) , but i'd rather avoid this for obvious reasons!
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: changed the subject title to make the content more obvious
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