Windows 7 Slow. Constant Hard Drive Activity.
Posted by Shaun McDonnell on May 6, 2009
This one had me stumped for about an hour today.
I have been running Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit for a couple years now on my Dell Precision with 0 problems. So, naturally I decided it was time to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate.
Much to my dismay, after performing a fresh installation of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Edition I found that it was acting very strange. Sometimes it would sit for a few seconds when I did simple things like close a window or open the Start Menu. It was very slow. Furthermore, the hard drive light was always on and the hard drive was always making sounds.
I knew this had to be a driver issue because the machine had worked flawlessly under the heavy pressures of Vista. So I started by flashing the BIOS. That didn’t work. I tried updating my display drivers and that did nothing.
I decided to see if I needed to update the Intel Chipset driver and it turns out that solved everything. Microsoft has done a good job of making sure Windows 7 gets all of the correct drivers during installation as all of my other machines have worked flawlessly.
Unfortunately, Intel doesn’t have any Windows 7 x64 specific drivers:
However, using the Vista x64 drivers did the trick and everything works great now.
-Shaun
John said
That was exactly my problem as well. I was starting to wonder if I should go back to Vista, but everything is normal now.
Thanks for the info.
ciro said
Thanks man that solved it over here too judgin how many people is experiencing that u should have a monument,google on that to have a rogue idea on how widespread the problem is,strange is over here it happened only few days after the installation…