I thought this about Vista, which is why I turned off indexing and every other useless HD intensive activity. Works fine, now. Disks continuously chuntering away in the background simply isn’t acceptable.

Do you shut it down or just put it to sleep? Windows 7 runs defrag on a schedule and might be kicking in whilst you’re on the move.

Might be worth trying hibernate rather than sleep (or full shutdown) at least to rule out the possibility?

@Andrew I’ll give it a go! After a set time, though, it hibernates anyway.

I have an x41 running the RC version and I have had no issues so far. in fact it is much faster than XP.
I did find that to install Win7 on a ThinkPad you have to hunt around for the correct Lenovo drivers and to overwrite the power management defaults etc. Also disable as many pointless services that hammer the HDD for no reason.
You could also check the HDDs using SpinRite to see where it might have gone wrong.

I usually partly disable Superfetch and indexing when I use Vista or 7. I still enable Superfetch for startup processes (you can do this by changing a registry key). I’ve found doing these things keeps HD activity to a minimum in 7.

I also have a ThinkPad, or rather, have had two. Both are rock solid and the only reason for getting rid of the first was to get the second. I have retained both hard disks and have one of their ultrabay adapters; both still work.

I did disable indexing in Vista; also, I run Fedora most of the time. Nevertheless both disks have survived multiple re-formats and re-installs, huge data restores and both are still going.

As always, laptops *should* survive is not the same as laptops *will* survive. I don’t suppose you need indexing and if you do, how about a dedicated appliance and web front end to indexed corporate file-stores accessed over a VPN, rather than beating the hell out of your laptop?

Sir just said the magic word; 1.8 inch disks. They are not up to much and were showing signs of age back in the plain old XP days. I’ve had the RC on my T60 full-szie thinkypoo since last august, on a 320Gb SATA mechanical drive, and it’s been absolutely fine. I would lay a small bet that my laptop leads a more mobile life than yours…

I thought it was just me,my desktop is doing a similar thing with windows 7.The same system has run XP and Vista with no probs but 7 plays up but only just recently. Did a roll back the first time as it said it couldnt repair and all seemed fine for two days. I shut the system dow and when I restarted it, it got stuck in the boot up. Turned it off and on again and hey presto on we go. I’m sure Microsoft will deal with it eventually.Hasn’t killed my hard drives though,touch wood.

Buy a Mac

Been running W7 on my Aspire One-150 netbook since a week after it came out, using the Netbook as a testbed to see if I liked the O/S. Theory being that if it ran alright on a netbook it should be hunky-dory on any other machine. BTW, thanks to PcPro for the info about educational discounts/downloads, as it only cost me £30!! Re above discussion and disk drives;- I have had no problems at all so far, boots OK every time, and no screens of death, blue or black. W7 runs just fine on my netbook, I haven’t noticed increased disk activity, or heat fan activity either for that matter. It is at least as fast as XP used to be on the same machine. Though given the discussion and the info on it, I might now trial disabling the disk indexing service, just to see if it affects noise levels, and battery life. I will certainly consider disable it on my other Acer laptop running W7 (still going strong too), and my main PC when I eventually upgrade it. Perhaps the problems are an accident or coincidence relating to a particular disk technology, or size, or even brand?

if it is running a defrag whilst in sleep mode, then there is a serious bug.

This sounds like hardware failure to me. 2 identical laptops demonstrate identical errors? Sounds like a faulty hard drive design. Computer intermittently fails to boot? I’ve seen that happen more times than I like to admit. You likely have a failing hard drive, HD controller, loose connection, or possibly just poor ventilation in your work area.

Nope, no problems here. Have Win7 running on about a dozen machines, 3 with RAID5, the rest as standard mechanical drives – Toshiba, Western Digital and Seagate. I do notice however that there is a massive amount of disk activity almost all the time. The RAID units buzz and clang quite a bit – and this increased activity does occasionally cause a performance stutter. Considering laptop drives are slower, I can only imagine a lot of this increased disk activity will only ensure misery in terms of performance, and beating the unit into the ground. Guess SD is the way to go, at least for portable computers…

I am running W7 on my main tower system and it keeps waking up from Sleep in the middle of the night. So last night I enabled Hibernate and hibernated it instead of sleeping it. Surprise, surprise it woke up again. I can only assume Norton 360 or W7’s own maintenance schedule is kicking off but I can’t find any scheduled event causing it to happen. A full system virus scan doesn’t show up any problems.
Also I have had a couple of chkdsk runs on startup recently repairing and reparsing files.

I’ve generally had no problems except with my MCE machine under the telly and that has become unusable since installing Win 7 (I’ve tried 32 and 64 bit installs). I was using a single drive but last night I put Win7 on its own disk and that runs better but the Win7 disk is still overactive.

If the machine is coming out of sleep you need to check the scheduled tasks because there are lots of things which can now bring the computer out of sleep and some of the times chosen seem a bit random.

Surely it’s to do with the disks. The physical size of a 2.5″ hdd has not changed but there are more and more mb available so either there are more thinner platters or more tightly written files. Much the same could be said about 3.5″ drives, I gather there have been some problems with terrabyte drives as well.

My case is even more weird. One day i brought a Windows 7 pack in the office and just because of that ALL the computers immediately shut down. It took more than two weeks to realize that all we had to do is take the package out.

Could the problem be related to the cold weather and moisture condensation on the older hardware as you go from outside to inside on such a regular basis? Is the desktop still the only one functioning?

Funny, my free version of Linux Mint on my nearly 10 year old Dell x200 seems to only access the hard drive when I ask the PC to do something. In the mean time it is silent and does nothing. Works really well and I can tell you that the laptop has seen some beatings over a decade.

But I can see why people like Microsoft ….. Windows 95/Me/NT/XP/Vista/7 …… errr actually I can’t. WAKE UP EVERY ONE!!

Has the hard drive died or is it merely corrupt? can it be formatted and re-used? if it’s genuinely died and needs replacing do you not think this is a hardware problem!!! Like common sense would dictate.

Hard drives are getting bigger and bigger and the technology more fragile, granted they’re still reliable but a wrongly placed whack in a laptop and KAPUT!! I’ve installed 7 on countless laptops/desktops and had no issues whatsoever. I’m almost in love with Bill Gates hahaha!

Creating an article just because you had a bad run of Harddisks or by your own admission it may be mishandling then blaming it on the OS sounds like plain bad apples.

Thats almost as good as Swissmac saying his OS could save a dead HD because of its “logic”.

I’ve been running W7 for about two months, on a self-built 8-month-old system which had been running Vista flawlessly. Yesterday evening I switched on, and it gets as far as the splash screen before rebooting and subsequently declaring the problem unfixable. I haven’t found any useful info on the internet other than ‘reformat and hope.’

It does seem a little odd that this is happening, anecdotally at least, quite a lot. I now need to buy a new HDD to transfer my files, before reformatting and reinstalling.

Has Microsoft released a statement?

Been running Windows 7 for 3 months on my HP Pavilion dv7-1448dx laptop. There’s NOTHING like that. Works like a bee, smart, clean, smooth. No HDD failure, Max. usage of RAM 40% (running Kaspersky Internet Security 2010). It can manage lots of programs working at the same time. Of course I do not bump and drop it like that, but if so, it’s got a software called HP 3D DriveGuard (guards against data loss due to sudden drops and bumps).

Don’t buy a Mac, 69 vulnerabilities needing to be patched (so far)? I’ll pass.
Regarding your OS problem and the BSOD.
Some of you should probably replace your power supply in your PC if you’re using desktop DELLs, HPs etc. You probably have crappy Bestec ones that explode after awhile (check out the Corsiar PSU stress test on youtube). Lots of BSODs can be attributed to bad PSUs, not enough power cycling. I had a Bestec explode after being switched back on, seen another generic shoot current into a Biostar motherboard and literally burn the PCB (actual flames). Most review sites agree that you should not have a cheap PSU. Which is why I don’t use any of the aformentioned OEM companies. I custom build, use only Corsair, BFG, OCZ or Thermaltake PSUs. Have only had 1 BSOD in 7, caused by a failing 9800 GTX+ OC 1GB GPU

windows 7 has killed one of my samsung 1tb hard drives and is on the way to killing another 500gb samsung hard drive. both satas.

thanks microshit.