Disk Chewing Revisited

It is my understanding that Windows 7 aka Vista SP3 will deal better with
services like these background tasks, Indexing and Defragging.

My problems is that when I start Media Center (Vista Ultimate) the damn
thing burps and chugs when I am watching one channel and recording another.
Happens when both are high def channels(more bandwidth).
This happens three or four times during one hour of recording.
The OS is doing something that I cannot see by switching to Process Explorer
or other service monitoring apps.
When the chugging and burping is happening, the hard disk light is on solid
for up to 20 seconds. Really only during the critical show moments and
never during commercials! Corporate Gremlin Conspiracy.

I have a Quad Intel processor, SATA 3G 1Tbyte drives and 4G RAM that looks
like it is all loafing when I view the CPU usage and disk i/o etc using
Process Explorer (Sysinternals).
So what the heck is causing my PC to chug???
The TV tuner is a dual channel, with hardware decoder.
And as I have said, Process Explorer show everything is using minimal
resources.
No spikes in any area.
I sometimes have a trace program running that watches and logs services
starting and stopping and I see nothing unusual (at least as far as I
understand).

I have all the latest updates from MS.

Well since they are HD channels, it's probably killing your cpus. Do you
have a graphics card? And it could also be that you don't have enough
bandwidth.

"Lorin" <> wrote in message
news:600177EC-F526-4AF7-8324-...
> It is my understanding that Windows 7 aka Vista SP3 will deal better with
> services like these background tasks, Indexing and Defragging.
>
> My problems is that when I start Media Center (Vista Ultimate) the damn
> thing burps and chugs when I am watching one channel and recording
> another.
> Happens when both are high def channels(more bandwidth).
> This happens three or four times during one hour of recording.
> The OS is doing something that I cannot see by switching to Process
> Explorer or other service monitoring apps.
> When the chugging and burping is happening, the hard disk light is on
> solid for up to 20 seconds. Really only during the critical show moments
> and never during commercials! Corporate Gremlin Conspiracy.
>
> I have a Quad Intel processor, SATA 3G 1Tbyte drives and 4G RAM that looks
> like it is all loafing when I view the CPU usage and disk i/o etc using
> Process Explorer (Sysinternals).
> So what the heck is causing my PC to chug???
> The TV tuner is a dual channel, with hardware decoder.
> And as I have said, Process Explorer show everything is using minimal
> resources.
> No spikes in any area.
> I sometimes have a trace program running that watches and logs services
> starting and stopping and I see nothing unusual (at least as far as I
> understand).
>
> I have all the latest updates from MS.
>