Windows Vista Disk Thrashing

I've tolerated Vista's insane disk thrashing forever now and usually the system would lock up with disk activity once in a session.  Having used Vista more often now, I decided to have a look at why in the world is this happening.  I have reduced it and here's the three basic culprit:

1. Windows Search Indexing - Go to the Services and disable this service from starting up.
2. Windows SuperFetch - This is also in the Services
3. Automatic Disk Defragmenting - Go to Accessories, System Tools and then Disk Defragmenter.  Then, disable the Run on a schedule option.

Of the three, disk defragmenter was the major culprit of locking up.  So, if you're suffering, disable this one first.

Error 207 (net::ERR_CERT_INVALID): Unknown error

Last night, I came across a curious issue with secure http connections to Google products on Chrome using my Vista laptop.  I could surf normally, but it would always go crazy when it'd go secure.  Researching online a bit for the issue, I've found that there are various causes for this.

The most common cause of this issue is the system date/time.  People advise to configure your date/time and timezone and sync it to time.windows.com.  I checked mine but it was already correct, so I kept looking.

Some of the other solutions being thrown around were clearing browser cache, playing with the SSL/TLS options on Google Chrome (via Under the Hood).  One serious suggestion was virus infections and a tampered hosts file (e.g. C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts), but I checked and there was nothing wrong with the file.

At the end of it, I found that Google, at one point, posted a note saying they fixed a browser bug, so I decided to update my browser.  Lo and behold, it fixed my issues.  But that doesn't mean it's the be all and all solution.

Updating Vista...

Vista has been utterly slow and it's taking days to update it.  This just references the issue I had with installing SP1.  It first won't show up in the Windows Update but apparently it's a matter of installing all the updates it needs.  When it did show up on Windows Update, it kept trying to install and it wasn't happening.  This article helped out.  I downloaded SP1 and SP2 from the article and am going through installing them via safe mode (F8 on startup).

Goodbye Gutsy... or not.

Sometimes, when you're tired, you do something really, really dumb.  So I decided to clean out the Linux partition on my old Acer laptop.  I had also discovered that the DVD drive can't read anything and the Acer recovery partition is throwing a fit on me by complaining about the dreaded missing GUI (*.WSI) files and it was giving me the error reason 0xa0000001.  Before it had dawned upon me too, I had made GRUB totally useless by purging the Linux partition (Way to go, idiot!).

To boot up my Windows Vista partition, I downloaded unetbootin and setup my 1 GB usb stick with Super Grub Disk.  Allow unetbootin to install the SGD because SGD2 doesn't work with it.

From SGD, the first thing I tried is to fix the Windows boot which would effectively kill GRUB on the mbr, but this did not work.  Using the Boot & Tools menu got me to select Boot Partition and start up my old Vista install.  At least I got to boot it!  Now to make my recovery partition work!

For resource, I'm going with this forum thread.  This reminded me that the way the partitions where setup when I got them was that I had an C: partition with the label ACER and a D: partition with the label DATA.  Since all the drive letters were mucked up badly, and Acer doesn't do a good job to make their recovery routines robust, I think I'll try to get my laptop partitions setup to resemble the way it did back when it was new.  Hopefully then I get finally get the factory reset stuff to work.