Okay, Vista, so what gives?

So I gave in. I've been secretly using Vista on a variety of machines for the past year or so. It's not that bad, but I must say I am very disappointed in it.
This is going to be a multi-part series focusing on what I hate most about Vista, and care enough to blog about.

Today's post is about my HP DC7600. It's a great machine. It came standard with 2gb of ram and a 250gb SATA drive. The motherboard has 4 SATA channels, so I added 2 80gb drives that I had available as spare parts. This is great, because I can use the extra drives for swap space, which I set up to do.

Because of my physical memory, I am required to put 2gb of memory on the C: partition in order to retain the crash dumps if and when errors occur. This should be fine, Windows manages memory well, right? Right? Another 1gb of swap had been placed on the new E: drive, and another 1gb on the F: drive.

So, things were going pretty nice. Until I came back to the computer some time later. I would start browsing in an open window, and there'd be a hang, a click from my desktop, and then a response from the browser. I've heard these clicks before: that's a hard drive turning on. I'm a systems engineer, so I hear these all the time, usually when diagnosing a failing hard drive. My gut instinct is that one of my swap drives was failing.

Luckily, I recall a setting I have seen in the (vastly superior) Windows XP power settings. This setting tells the hard drives to turn off after a certain amount of inactivity. While a nice feature, it never worked out well for me so I ultimately disabled it. The following illustrates the process of accomplishing this task in Vista. While similar steps are required to do this in XP, Vista adds several steps in the process. A normal user would have probably given up at some point in the process.

Step 1: You need to personalize your desktop. Seriously. (You can probably get to this through Display Settings in Control Panel, but that too, is a whole lot of mouse clicking.)

Step 2: Open the Screen Saver settings. Why? Because that's the only place I can find the Power Settings button!

Step 3: Click "Change Power Settings" Yes!

Step 4: But, wait, I am already high performance!? Click "Change Plan Settings"

Step 5: You're not done: Click "Change advanced power settings"

Step 6: Behold, the Power Options window!

Step 7: Navigate to the appropriate section: The default setting is 20 minutes.

Step 8: Change to "Never". When you return to this section later, it will be displayed as "0". Thanks for being consistent, Microsoft!

Conclusion: My drives were clicking off to conserve power. Because the additional drives contained swap space that may not be accessed frequently, it will turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity. When something needs to access the swap on that devices, it first will need to be powered back on. This behavior has changed since Windows XP, so they must have worked a bit on it, but they haven't quite gotten it dialed in yet, apparently. I really hope they fix this in SP1.