Bl**dy PC's

[neil_g]

Ok heres a shot a bit later after Id cooked some grub and made a cup of char, pc just sat there with firefox, elements and Paint open. No image open in elements

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/gallery/data/5203/ProcExp3.jpg

has all of the disk activity subsided now then? performance a bit better?

had you put a load of data onto the hard drive as per my last post?

its not the resources they are using just running in the background though is it !. Once the software has reported your pc useage to base and checked and downloaded any updates then the load on resources for that session subsides but the OP is asking about start up and thats where all these programs are scheduled to upload and download stuff every time you boot up which is slowing down the loading of windows.
Just having Norton and Windows updates on automatic will bring a pc to its knees if you are unaware of what it happening in the background.

You and I are obviously aware of this and can configure our pc's accordingly. The op and the vast majority of pc users are not aware and do not know how to optimise their pc's That is the subject of this thread as I understand it and we are clearly all trying to work to the same end in assisting the op and any other interested viewers of this thread.

windows update default is to download updates at 3am unless you specify otherwise, so unless the OP is booting his machine at 2:58 im pretty sure that wont be affecting boot times. it might bounce a request to the update server to check if there are updates and prompt if necessary but i doubt that would cause a significant performance hit. ive not seen any evidence of this through any version of windows in the past and i certainly would not recommend turning off updates. norton, now that might bring a PC to its knees but thats just because its rubbish..

back with XP yes i agree disable as much as you can including windows services that arent used. but these days with the spec of modern computers and the memory management in modern operating systems its a bit of a waste of time for minimal gain.

if as the OPs screenshot suggests the disk access has now stopped then id take a punt on it being indexing/defragging/superfetch doing its initial jobs. especially if their has been substantial data dumped onto the disk.

(sorry OP for the thread detour)

 

[DorsetDude]

That one looks OK now.

Have you got rid of surplus startups with your Soluto yet?

Of the 10 or so that I could remove I took off about 4 I think, the others all seemed to be needed.

OK.. This looks fine... What was the responsiveness like at this point? What was the CPU utilisation tab like?

I didnt look at the CPU tab but yes responsiveness was ok.

has all of the disk activity subsided now then? performance a bit better?

had you put a load of data onto the hard drive as per my last post?

I hadn't loaded a lot of data on on that day no. I had copied about 30Gb of photos over but that was middle of last week.

Thanks all for the advice.