Another Vista question.

[piggybank]

Any advice welcome for this one. The question I am asking, maybe a bit longwinded, is will I lose my photos?

My Vista Home Premium is working slow. Thanks for previous advice on CC Cleaner, but now even that does not speed things up. My problem is I have only 80 GB hard drive with a lot of photos to corrrelate and save to DVD.

The DVD drive was working OK 3 days back, now takes up to 5 minutes to check 'properties' or explore even an empty disk. With several thousand pictures to sort this is a pain, in 3 hours I had not saved one file.

I am running SP1 as SP2 stopped the modem from working by doing a botched update, giving no choice of cancel. Reload of driver was hard as Vista said could not locate INF file. Search of Internet cannot find my modem, a One World ADSL2 router 1 port.

Clearly I need to repair my present version, as a start. However, I worry about all the photos I have loaded to file by them chronologically (hence the large number).

If I repair by using the install disk, selecting repair, will the photos be lost or dissociated?

Next stage would be load SP2. However, without a later version of the modem driver with an accessible INF file this looks like being more than a routine chore. Downloading RC7 may be a choice but I doubt if it will load over a damaged SP1 version of Vista.

Computer is seemingly in good condition, the large number of crashes I am putting down to Vista. same for the slow access to the DVD drive. Hard drives seem OK and memory checked in the computer and at a computer repair shop. Virus scans OK.

Computer has Intel board, Pentium 4 at 3 Ghz, memory 1.5 Gb, 32 bit Vista Home Premium (genuine).

[Tarq57]

What AV do you use, Piggybank?
I've seen SP installs totally borked by Norton, and read about similar with some others.
(Know how to fix, if this was the problem...)

[Jofm5]

he DVD drive was working OK 3 days back, now takes up to 5 minutes to check 'properties' or explore even an empty disk. With several thousand pictures to sort this is a pain, in 3 hours I had not saved one file.



Make sure that you dont have all the photo's in a single folder as this can cause you some headaches that will slow down your machine. If you do have them in a single folder then move them into logical sub folders as parsing a large folder takes time and memory.

How much disk space is on your C: drive, if it is very low then the chances are that your computer is grinding to a halt as it is having a hard time using virtual memory and finding space for temporary files.

You may wish to invest in a USB external HDD, you can copy your pictures onto this to free up extra space on your main system HDD but also if you do wish to upgrade/repair your OS you can detach the USB drive knowing your pictures will be safe whilst you do this.

[piggybank]

Thanks for the info so far. I have the photos as files about 400 KB JPG each. There are several special ones of 10MB and more. I have years 1969, from the Trucial States days up to 2009 as year files, all in one pictures file. 16,825 files size 15,3 GB. Yes it looks like an external hard drive or a couple of 8GB flash memories.

When I get that done I will clear the whole hard drive and reload Vista. I used to wipe Windows 3.1 and Win 95, etc, every few months. It seemed to solve a lot of problems. Can this be done, a clean start with Vista?

AV is AVG Free version 8.5, mainly set "off" when I am sorting. Empty space on hard drive about 20GB

[Sprogget]

Wiping & reinstalling the os every three months suggests you haven't got the basic set up quite nailed down. It's akin to taking the car to be crushed because it has a flat tyre!

Fwiw, if you right click on the taskbar in Vista & then launch the task manager, you will see a range of options before you. Look on processes & sort by cpu usage to see what is hogging the resources of the machine.

[Jofm5]

Just a quick addition to what sprogget said - you will have to select "Show processes from all users" to see the system services.

[piggybank]

Once again, thanks for the useful info. Moving the photos to another hard drive as separate years seems to have solved the problem.

Replying to the remark on wiping the drive regularly.

It seemed to be common in years gone by. In the days of DOS 6.22 I never had the need, but the various Windows versions I went through it was an easy process to carry out and the improvement was marked. Drives were small, wipe was quick, and end up clearing the Master Boot Record as well.

I could have everything up and running in two hours.

[Jofm5]

The big problem with a huge amount of files in a directory is not a result of the operating system itself but more of explorer that sits on top of the operating system.

Every time you move to a folder it will try to present to you on the screen the contents of the folder, however if you have your folder view sorted by file type it will then load the whole directory listing into memory, then sort it and then load it into the list so you can view it. It is not a "Windows" thing it is the fact you cannot sort a list until you have read the whole list.

This is where the DOS prompt can come in useful, by default it will list the files as they appear in the file allocation table, so will be marginally affected by a huge amount of files in a single folder - however we can replicate the same problem in dos using the system variables (I wont go into it here but anyone interested feel free to ask).

Reducing the number of files in any one single folder reduces the number of read operations required and the amount of memory to store the complete directory listing for sorting purposes. Thus my recommendation you break them down into sub folders - your breaking a big job down into chunks so it only loads what is in the current folder etc....

Glad you got it sorted for the time being.... you should not need to re-format your machine, just keep it tidy :ok:

[RobAnt]

If you have a spare USB memory stick (a 2 GB one is quite cheap anyway these days) you can plug this in and use "ReadyBoost" to improve the performance of the swap file. This can help a little with speed issues.

To do this, simply right click on the "removeable disk" and select Properties. ReadyBoost will be one of the tabs available.

Normally USB stick memory is not as fast as a hdd swap file, but Vista uses it intelligently to ease some of the pressure off. So this doesn't work as well in XP and lower, although there are ways of implementing it.

Hopefully, the upcoming USB3 standard (which is reported to be 10 times faster than USB2) will improve speed even more, but it will require a hardware change, and is only available on expensive high-end motherboards at the moment.

Of course this doesn't alleviate the need for good housekeeping - and an 80GB hdd is very small by todays standards.

[green granite]

and an 80GB hdd is very small by todays standards.

Especially when you can get an internal 500GB disc for £35-40