Windows Defender and biggest HDD

[Matt_B]

Right, a bit of a weird one here.

My laptop is running very slow at times and I am trying to get to the bottom of it before I wipe and reinstall everything. One of the things I think may be slowing it down is as follows:

My setup is the following:

C: drive ~70GB
D: drive ~70GB

G: external NAS drive ~320GB (connected to via wireless). The access to the NAS drive is annoyingly slow, about 100Kb/s at some times.

I noticed that folders with long random tokenlike filenames kept appearing on the G: drive, which after some googling appear to be folders created by Windows Defender for it's updates. I think the fact it is using such a slow drive for updates might be part of the reason my computer slows down, the problem is it uses it by default as it is the largest free space drive on my system.

Does anyone know a way to change which drive it uses so I can rule this out of my problem?

I have ran several virus scans and a few adaware and defender scans and all is well on that front.

 

[Durham Fox]

Have you tried disabling VSS? Not suggesting you should leave it disabled but might help identify the issue.

 

[Matt_B]

Have you tried disabling VSS? Not suggesting you should leave it disabled but might help identify the issue.

Do you mean SourceSafe? I don't know if I have that running TBH, but I will give it a try

 

[Matt_B]

The main problem is that every now and again it half locks up. I can still access the start menu and drag windows about, open tabs in a browser etc, but I cannot open new programmes. When I click a shortcut it does nothing for about 5 minutes then it might pop up, sometimes takes longer or doesn't at all. The most annoying this is that obviously I can';t get task manager to open at this point to see what is using the processor and RAM

 

[Durham Fox]

Do you mean SourceSafe? I don't know if I have that running TBH, but I will give it a try

No, Shadow Copy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy

It was mullering my machine.

Sounds crazy but have you also checked you havent accidentally moved your machine in to a power saving mode?

 

[Matt_B]

No, Shadow Copy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy

It was mullering my machine.

Sounds crazy but have you also checked you havent accidentally moved your machine in to a power saving mode?

I always run in power saving mode when on battery but it makes no difference when plugged in and on high power mode.

Never heard of shadow copy, will check that out later cheers.

 

[Durham Fox]

I always run in power saving mode when on battery but it makes no difference when plugged in and on high power mode.

Never heard of shadow copy, will check that out later cheers.

VSS is also known as Shadow Copy.

 

[lazzer]

I knew that