Vista and laptop HDDs

[sinsi]

I've noticed that in my (admittedly short) time as an on-site tech that laptop hard drives fail a lot and they all seem to be Vista.
One of the criticisms of Vista was that it is too aggressive with paging (lots of HDD use) as well as indexing/defragging (more HDD use).
Every computer (laptop or desktop) I have seen running Vista, the HDD light is on all the time.

At the moment, in a week of 15-20 jobs, three will be HDD replacement for laptops with Vista. Mostly it won't boot past the logon screen, and
when I try to recover data the bad sector count grows and grows until Windows wants me to format the drive...

So, I was curious as to your personal experience with this. I never went Vista, stuck with XP until win7, so I don't have any benchmark for comparison.

[Neil]

I bought a new desktop computer 3 years ago with Vista installed, the hard drive was churning away constantly. The drive failed after 10 months & was replaced under warranty. No such problems with Win 7.

[Bill Cravener]

I use Resource Monitor to see what's happening on a poky Vista machine. Click the Resource button at the bottom of Task Managers Resource tab to view activity of the disk drive.

Take note that I have only 45 processes running as shown on the linked picture below. Until I cleaned her out there was over a 100 processes running. Junk processes like Java Update Scheduler, some network thing Windows Media player was loading, etc, etc, etc. I'd be suspicious of a filename listed in my Task Manager processes list so I'd Google up the culprit and see what it's purposes was for and if it is a required file that must not be touched. Many on my machine were unnecessary. So I'd hunt down where the culprit was being loaded (most of the time you'll find it in the registry) and I'd delete it.

Got her down to just 45 processes, which freed up a good bit of RAM also, my hard drive activity slowed down considerably and I couldn't be happier with the way my machine runs.

Here is a snapshot of my machine at idle: http://www.quickersoft.com/pictures/taskm.jpg

[the_mart]

I replaced my HDD last year after it was showing signs of dying. I was using Vista at the time, but I am not sure it was a contributing factor. The disk access would suddenly slow down to the point where the computer became totally unusable, and the drive would click very slowly. It took a few minutes just to get to the boot loader screen!

When I put the Vista DVD in and booted to the recovery console (after a very long wait), I managed to copy files off of it (also very slowly) onto a backup HDD, and then after some hours it would suddenly pop back to life. It happened a few times, and I decided to replace the drive as a new one cost less than £50. Apparently a lot of other customers experienced similar issues with that drive.