IBM software preventing harddrive suspend...?

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MartinB · #1 Post by **MartinB** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 6:56 am

Hi,

Other that the typical Norton Antivirus preinstalled on most T42s, does anyone know if some of the IBM software is preventing the harddrive from going into suspend (because of the read activity generated by the software...)?

#2 Post by **richk** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 10:32 am

If a hardware driver prevents suspending, there is normally a message in the event log. Look there.

MartinB · #3 Post by **MartinB** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 12:58 pm

richk wrote:If a hardware driver prevents suspending, there is normally a message in the event log. Look there.

Is this message then labeled as an error or what exactly should I look for?

Paul Unger · #4 Post by **Paul Unger** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 3:37 pm

MartinB,

I'm following this thread with much interest. I have a T42 with an 80GB Samsung drive (MP0804H). I enable 'spindown' in NHC (the only place I know to do such a thing) and it does, but every five seconds or so it spins up again . . . I figure leaving it spin all the time is better than starting and stopping every few seconds, but I'd by far rather have it spin down and stay quiet!

#5 Post by **richk** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 4:01 pm

I think it is normally set as an error, but it is up to the driver to report the problem and to post the severity.

#6 Post by **tomh009** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 5:03 pm

Paul Unger wrote:I'm following this thread with much interest. I have a T42 with an 80GB Samsung drive (MP0804H). I enable 'spindown' in NHC (the only place I know to do such a thing) and it does, but every five seconds or so it spins up again . . . I figure leaving it spin all the time is better than starting and stopping every few seconds, but I'd by far rather have it spin down and stay quiet!

Assuming you are running Windows XP here, start up Task Manager, maximize it to full screen and then add columns for disk reads and disk writes. Sort on one of those two columns. Now, wait and watch: whatever process is accessing your disk will show increasing figures in (most likely the read) column.

#7 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 6:19 pm

Wow tomh009, that's a neat tip. I never knew that feature was there.

Paul Unger · #8 Post by **Paul Unger** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 6:57 pm

GomJabbar wrote:Wow tomh009, that's a neat tip. I never knew that feature was there.

Neither did I!

So the guilty parties are ati2evxx.exe (ATI Hotkey Poller?) and lsass.exe (part of the MS security mechanism). They're writing about 6k every second . . . Safe to disable?

#9 Post by **tomh009** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 7:04 pm

You can disable the ATI hotkeys, for sure. I vaguely recall that this does inordinate I/O on the X31 as well.

But LSASS is core Windows and cannot be disabled. Can you take a look at your event log and see if there are a lot of events being written there?

Wiz · #10 Post by **Wiz** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 7:58 pm

tomh009 wrote:You can disable the ATI hotkeys, for sure. I vaguely recall that this does inordinate I/O on the X31 as well.

I disabled the ati2evxx.exe basically because i hate to have a lot of processes running that i don't need. Then i found out that powerplay doesn't seems to work as supposed to without this service running. So i did a search and found several others saying the same thing. I guess the effect of disabling this service could be a warmer GPU, fan running more or never stop and batterytime might decrease.
I didn't really check closely to find out the difference when stopping this service and keep it running, but i could also see nhc reporting that the GPU were running at max performance all the time without this service running even with powerplay set to running at "Optimal Battery life" when running on battery. So if this is true there might be some negative effects as well when disabling this service.

#11 Post by **tomh009** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 8:50 pm

If you want to dig deeper into it, get Process Explorer (just google for it, it's downloadable from Microsoft). You can then see what files/registry keys each process has open. As I recall that showed what the heck ATI was doing ... but I forget the details now!

MartinB · #12 Post by **MartinB** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:45 am

Paul Unger wrote:
GomJabbar wrote:Wow tomh009, that's a neat tip. I never knew that feature was there.
Neither did I! So the guilty parties are ati2evxx.exe (ATI Hotkey Poller?) and lsass.exe (part of the MS security mechanism). They're writing about 6k every second . . . Safe to disable?

Exactly the same processes is generating disk activity in my case... BUT Isass.exe is only reading the disk when task manager is active. Process Eksplorer actually shows that ati2evxx.exe is the only one generating activity..

MartinB · #13 Post by **MartinB** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:50 am

Paul Unger wrote:MartinB,

I'm following this thread with much interest. I have a T42 with an 80GB Samsung drive (MP0804H). I enable 'spindown' in NHC (the only place I know to do such a thing) and it does, but every five seconds or so it spins up again . . . I figure leaving it spin all the time is better than starting and stopping every few seconds, but I'd by far rather have it spin down and stay quiet!

I'm not running NHC, is there a standard IBM utilty handling this "spindown" function?

#14 Post by **GomJabbar** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 7:02 am

AFAIK, this option is included in Windows Power Options, Battery MaxiMiser, and Power Manager. It is called: "Turn off hard disks".

MartinB · #15 Post by **MartinB** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 7:26 am

GomJabbar wrote:AFAIK, this option is included in Windows Power Options, Battery MaxiMiser, and Power Manager. It is called: "Turn off hard disks".

I think these functions are "total" suspend, not simply spinning down the rotation speed... right?

IBM software preventing harddrive suspend...?

IBM software preventing harddrive suspend...?

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