I hibernate my computer instead of fully shutting down to save on startup time, fully rebooting every week or so to avoid too much memory gunk
It resumes from hibernation very quickly and, if the resume is within a few hours of hibernation, Windows 7 (Home Premium 64 bit) is ready to use virtually immediately and disk churning finishes in a few seconds.
However, if I resume the next day, it can take a minute or two for the log on screen to be responsive, and up to around 10 minutes for disk churning to finish (although the computer is usable much earlier). This has got worse over time and it’s not much better the day after a full reboot. It’s getting towards the stage where I may no longer be saving time…
What could be causing this?
*Checking Task Scheduler I don’t think there are any daily tasks that could account for this. I’ve disabled Windows Customer Experience participation as that accounted for most of the daily tasks
*I use AVG Antivirus but with no scheduled scan (signature updates are scheduled daily though but they couldn’t tie up the computer for 10 minutes, right?)
*Other non-system software generally running is MS Office, Skype, Winamp, Google Desktop and Dropbox
Hibernation uses the disk drive to save the memory after a few hours. (Before that, the computer just stays on in a low power state.) So maybe the problem is your hard drive. Are any other hard drive tasks slower? That’s what mine did a month or so before it went out.
If not, try defragging your disk drive. Maybe there’s not quite enough room for the hibernation file, and so it’s having to be split up into chunks. Right click on your hard drive in Computer and choose properties, then choose the Tools tab, then choose the defragment button.
Hibernation goes right to the disk and powers down. But that’s a good point, Windows 7 has a hybrid setting, which suspends the computer and saves the state to disk. After a period of time (user settable, IIRC), the computer powers down and it’s as if it was hibernated. Perhaps the OP has this mode set.
ETA: I use suspend most of the time, even for overnight. It will last over a day for my laptop on battery alone, but YMMV. That comes up much faster than hibernate.
Thanks - not got hybrid sleep enabled though. Have defragged my computer (thought of that earlier today - haven’t got a magic instant defragger yet) using Puran Defrag’s boot mode (to defrag system files too). Will see how that affects resuming tomorrow, but the system files didn’t appear to be very fragmented in the first place.
I also use hibernate . The only “big” program running most of the time when I hibernate is Opera. I’ve noticed the phenomenon in the OP. Wake back up later the same day, no thrashing. Wake up the next morning big thrashing. I have checked on resources and it seems to almost all Opera. (The newer versions of Opera are sadly horrible when it comes to disk thrashing. I think the browser is checking on cache and such and doing a little housecleaning. If there was another browser out there that did tabs right, I’d switch in a flash.)
So it might be something like that. One of the programs you’re running has suddenly realized its been a while since it last tidied things up, phoned home, or whatever and is busy for a bit.
First tell us a little more about your PC, age?, Operating system?, CPU?, Ram?
Systems that are low on available memory exhibit the behavior you mention pretty consistently and usually perk up alot when you add RAM. Along that same line, try disabling the startup tasks for skype. Its kinda famous for being a ram hog.
Something else few folks realize too is , not all hard drives are created equal. two 500GB SATA2 hard drives can have dramatic difference in speed. You may have a slow drive, or one that is showing some wear depending on age. you may want to check out the SMART status on your drive and see what it looks like. I love a little program called drivesitter there is a free 30 day trial. Let it run for a few days and see if it gives you any useful info. It will give detailed perfomance specs on your machine including temperature. If possible try popping the cover on your PC (not the hard drive itself :eek:) and gently touch the top of the hard drive casing. It will be warm but if it is uncomfortably warm, that drive is running hot and will probably fail sometime in the not too distant future. Hot drives run slow.
I had a pretty good disk thrash wakeup this morning. Turns out Mrs. FtG had left IE running when I put it in hibernate last night. Checked on CPU stats via task manager and indeed Opera (see above) and IE where battling it out for CPU (and presumably other) resources. Took a good 30+ seconds before both were happy.
(Some of the disk stuff could be virtual memory related, not directly intended disk accesses.)
When two+ programs are trying to do a bunch of disk stuff at the same time, things get really, really slow.