System Utilities

My wife started to complain that the laptop became slower. The laptop has a hybrid disk. I think I have found the cause. The clean at boot when the clean up was missed with the daily schedule.

I had just randomly chosen a clean up time for the daily schedule, the system clean up seems to fill up the cache with useless (deleted) files. Are deleted flles written to recycle bin by any chance?

System feels more responsive now (IE and Chrome launched with google search< 2 secs cold, 1 sec hot in stead of 3 to 5 it took before).

 

Deleted files are erased by bypassing the recycle bin, so you shouldn't see anything growing. It's possible that if the files were in use, they would first be moved to a temporary location, then erased. Did you happen to notice what the file types were?

 

What files: Just garbage files from internet (chrome) and email (outlook).
Are the files in use: Not on boot, but I known CCLeaner allways complains that is unable to cleanup Chrome files. When she was using the PC and schedule launched WebRoot cleanup utility the Chrome files could be in use. I asked because changing a file (writing) clears that file from hybrid read cache.

EDIT.1
I tested my idea and ran a script at boot just reading files. Checked whether windows caching were off, also used group policy to force volatile cache of hybrid drive to be used. Reading same areas's over and over again, makes the hybrid cache think they are important, maybe boot up usage gets a higher importance as well. Wife confirmed browser loading is faster again (well sort of "internet is faster"). So disabling cleanup schedule seems to solve this issue for my wife's laptop with hybrid disk. It has nothing to do with WSA, just the way a hybrid cache works (and maybe reason some people claimed WSA made their PC slower while this was hard to believe because WSA is one of the fastest/leanest AV's I know).

EDIT 2.
What I don't understand is that the laptop has 3GB RAM and the Hybrid has 4GB of SSD. Normally junk file cleanup (browsing session) does not use more as 250 MB, so cached programs should not suffer from cleanup. Must be something else not working well also to have this impact (> at least over 2.5 GB data refreshed in test script before performance drop is noticeable).

 

I'm curious as to what "Secure Erase" level you have configured? Perhaps it is the contention of hard disk flushing when WSA is writing over files many times.

Because so much happens on bootup, it would probably be worth us pushing back the scheduled on-boot scans and scheduled on-boot cleanups to a few minutes after, just to avoid the slowdown.

Any opinion on that?

 

I couldn't agree more Joe.

I had to disable scheduled scans on my dad computer because it made the computer (an old computer) almost unusable for a too long period at boot.

 

Does he tend to have his computer off during the scheduled time? That would cause it to start a scan when the computer turns back on, which may not be ideal - I agree that delaying this would be wise.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

Yeah,

you right Joe.

My dad doesn't turn on often his computer so he's usually off at scheduled time.

 

probably a good idea, because automated schedules for someone not cleaning up the PC is a nice addition IMO