So yeah, Windows and I don't get along. I don't know if I am just doing it wrong, or if other people are just so used to this kind of crap that they don't notice it, but whenever I have a windows install for more than a few months, it gets SLOOOOOOOW. Luckily for me, my supervisor lets me use Ubuntu at work so I don't have to deal with constant lag. Unfortunately, there are a couple of websites that I need for my daily work that rely on ActiveX, and so I have a virtual machine with XP on it that I ONLY use for those specfic sites. No surfing, no installing random apps, I NEVER use this system for anything but Microsoft Office and a couple of order processing sites for work. Despite that, this damn thing is STILL running like molassas today. I've rebooted several times, run CCleaner and Bleachbit, and disabled nearly all the services and startup items, and yet it still sits here, at a clean desktop, with nothing open, swapping like a mofo. The hard drive is just grinding and grinding and grinding. When I run the task manager, I can see SVHOST.EXE is using a little CPU, and growing in memory size. (To be clear, I'm referring to the virtual hard drive and system, Ubuntu is still running fine and my phsycial hard disk is idle) So, Windows users, how do I cope with this?
This is true for pretty much every single Windows install I've ever used. There doesn't seem to be any workaround for this. Some people blame the registry (I.e. that you should clean and defragment the registry), but I have no idea how true is that.
Well as I said, I've cleaned the registry, but it still does it. For now, my VM seems to have stableized, but if anyone has any suggestions for legit registry cleaners I'm interested.
From what I have seen constant grinding is caused by a virus or lack of RAM... One thing you can try is to disable page file and see how things go then. I almost always disable page file, it gives a massive performance boost in most cases, providing there's 2GB+ RAM so you would not face out of RAM errors.
