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My desktop takes ~3 minutes to fully wake up from sleep modeHibernate. I hear my hard drive clicking for ~3 minutes after wake. Restarts are also painfully slow. I look at CPU usage and its quite low...2-3% per core. The Desktop comes up quickly. But, accessing a program (IE) or OS operation (start menu) takes quite a bit longer.

I uninstalled some random programs I don't use and it seems to have helped a little. Right now memory usage is 1.63GB. Are there any decent tools to help me figure out why my PC is running sub-par? What else can I check?

Specs: windows 7, 6GB ram, i7 930 2.8GHz CPU, gaming video card.

Drive: wdc wd1002faex-00y9a0. OS installed on 8/31/2010. No I don't defrag. It is my understanding that windows does not by itself now. Hard drive passed a diagnostic and SMART (What specifically this test runs I do not know...but you can click the link).

As a point of reference, my Vista laptop with older, lesser hardware (Mac hardware, Bootcamp) is up and ready in ~1 minute tops. The hard drive remains silent during the process.

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    what about the specifics of your hard drive? Make, model, RPM, Age, etc? Almost sounds like the hard drive might be failing... waking from sleep is supposed to the quickest.
    – Bon Gart
    Commented Apr 28, 2012 at 16:30
  • This is very likely your AV software being obnoxious. But Windoze is prone to this problem in general, as the I/O queues get badly backed up at times.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Commented Apr 28, 2012 at 19:14
  • Have you defragmented your disk lately? Run the analyze option in defrag and see whether pagefile.sys is highly fragmented.
    – Ben Voigt
    Commented Apr 28, 2012 at 19:15
  • (And turning off indexing may help a little.)
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Commented Apr 28, 2012 at 19:15
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    Are you using Hibernate or Sleep? There is a big difference here as with hibernate, Windows caches the memory into a file on your hard drive called Hiberfil.sys, which would explain the excessive HDD usage. The size of the file is the same as your RAM (so in your case 6gb).
    – Oliver G
    Commented Apr 30, 2012 at 15:04

1 Answer 1

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When waking from suspend aka sleep your HDD should barely be involved. Why? Because most of your running applications should have stayed in RAM, that's the whole design around suspend.

Considering this, if your HDD is causing such problems after waking, it is probably starting to fail. Difficulty reading a drive is one of the first indications a drive is going to fail soon.

I highly recommend you replace the HDD, and stop using it all together once you have all your data off of it. First off, replacing it with a newer HDD will give you better performance, even if your previous HDD was working properly. Second off, you'll get more storage than you had before. Third off, depending on the model, you can actually use less electricity with a newer model.

With your system specs, 3 minutes is an unacceptable boot length. And you are correct, Vista and up automatically schedule defrags. Defragmentation of a HDD has been irrelevant for a handful of years now, as it would typically take years to become a problem anyways. If you are on Vista, consider upgrading to Windows 7, it will utilize your hardware better.

Finally "gaming video card", is not a specification, that's a subjective approximation. For all we know, you could be guising a matrox as a "gaming video card". (that's a joke, for the lamen)

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  • He mis-phrased the question, this is about hibernate in which disk activity is normal.
    – Jeff F.
    Commented Apr 30, 2012 at 15:10
  • Well then he should consider suspend instead :P
    – BloodyIron
    Commented Apr 30, 2012 at 15:12

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