Windows 7 Annoyances

Hard Disk

Your hard disk is more than just a storage device; it’s a friend. It holds your operating system, keeps your personal data intact, and supplements your system’s memory. The speed and health of your hard disk is one of the most important factors in your computer’s performance, not to mention its reliability and security. Yet it’s also the one component that requires the most attention and often is the most neglected. Awww.

The following topics all deal with different aspects of your hard disk and how you can get Windows to use it most effectively. Later in this section, you’ll find tips on upgrading and repartitioning your hard disk, to allow you to keep your disk and its data in tip-top shape.

A Quick Performance Hack

There’s a nearly hidden option that’s turned off by default in Windows 7. It can increase hard disk performance, but in doing so, may also increase the odds of data loss.

Open Device Manager (devmgmt.msc) and expand the Disk drives branch. Right-click your hard disk, select Properties, and choose the Policies tab.

By default, the Enable write caching on the device option is turned on. But the other option, Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device, is unchecked. Why?

Both options here allow Windows to wait until a period of low activity before writing unsaved data to the drive, which improves drive performance considerably. In either case, you can lose data if the power is cut to the drive before that data is written. To help quell data loss, Windows ...