Constant downloading: Effects on the system

spooky donkey

Hi ,
I was wondering has any one noticed the effects of having youre PC on 24/7 for a few weeks. Ive been downloading at 120 k for almost a month and my hard drive starting giving strange info in the properties. It wasent reporting the correct drive space and was failing to open windows explorer the odd time. I gave the machine a break over night and its fine now. Seemed like the HD was over heating.

Does downloading constantly keep youre HD running all the time or is the info cashed and written at intervials to the HD.

Also has anyone noticed any other side effects of heavy net uasge ????

hefty_langer

have you considered de-fragging the HD - you would notice quite a jump in performance if the HD was badly fragmented.
Also you might consider putting a fan on the HD to keep it cool...

hefty_langer

spooky donkey wrote:

Does downloading constantly keep youre HD running all the time or is the info cashed and written at intervials to the HD.

AFAIK the data is written to temporary folder until the download is complete and then copied to your desired location on the HD.

seamus

spooky donkey wrote:

Hi ,
I was wondering has any one noticed the effects of having youre PC on 24/7 for a few weeks. Ive been downloading at 120 k for almost a month and my hard drive starting giving strange info in the properties. It wasent reporting the correct drive space and was failing to open windows explorer the odd time. I gave the machine a break over night and its fine now. Seemed like the HD was over heating.

Does downloading constantly keep youre HD running all the time or is the info cashed and written at intervials to the HD.

Also has anyone noticed any other side effects of heavy net uasge ????

Depends on what you're using. I'd say most download managers, or any progs that deal with downloading files have a small data buffer in RAM, and would flush it periodically to HDD. You're talking small though. At a constant 120K, you might as well be writing direct to disk. What the hell is so big to download 24/7 for a few weeks? Did you just dump the entire link directory of Suprnova into your BT client?

Give it a break, scandisk, defrag, reboot. Anything you're deleting should be deleted before the defrag. Then let it go off again.

Problems indicating the correct size of files/folders/volumes, and explorere giving you hassle, is usually a good indicator of problem with the FAT (or the NTFS equiv.). A defrag (a scandisk may too) will rebuild these tables for you.

Kristok

Nothing you can do windows wares down, I used to download all the time in my old job on my laptop and after a while windows just starts getting slower and slower. It happens with windows over years but downloading sorta ages your os quicker, defragging only helps slightly a full format or a ghost image reinstall every couple months is the best thing to do.

lomb

spooky donkey wrote:

Hi ,


Also has anyone noticed any other side effects of heavy net uasge ????

yep crazy contention because warez monkeys are downloading on the same isp

Ciaran500

spooky donkey wrote:

Also has anyone noticed any other side effects of heavy net uasge ????

My friend nearly went blind from it!!!

spooky donkey

Well if it is writing to a folder then its still HD access.
Defragging is not much use when you are running win XP on ntsc.
I am looking into getting some HD fans, but the 24 /7 for a mohth was an expirment i wont be using it as mch in the future.

And my eye sight is fine despite every thing , thank you very much!

Cabaal

Running a machine 24/7 for almost 2 years now

No issues really, machine hangs the odd time but thats usually due to me doing some system change without restarting,
Its patched to the last and running only what it needs, nothing else.

Hardwise I've had only 1 drive give issues and it was old to start with, system runs @ 100% CPU load (SETI@Home) and temp of 42c for CPU and average 20c for system.

halenger

With my 2K machine I've found it can become entirely unusable if left on for a few days straight. Depends though. If it's woken up too fast it can go nuts but if you give it a chance to try to resurect firefox's zillion tabs etc then it can be ok.

Zonealarm's vsmon.exe can also go quite mad - can cause very very bad freezing. Don't think it's been too bad since I uninstalled and reinstalled it.

rob1891

I also run another machine 24/7 and disks dying are a worry however there is a thing called SMART. Modern hdds will keep track of internal failures, things you will never actually notice because there is some redundancy in the drive to overcome these failures. You can get programs that will extract the failure statistics and predict whether you drive is on its last legs. I can't recommend a windows program that does this (my machine runs bsd), but they are available i.e.:

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

rob

MickFarr

Cache is the answer!

Hard drives store data in a hardware cache (temporary memory) and write the data to the hard disk later. Your hard drive probably has 8MB of cache!

Even if you are not downloading anything your hard drive will be used by Windows to store information. Check out Virtual memory.

Also it is said that spinning up and spinning down your hard drive all the time is worse than having it spinning all the time. Just like a car engine, you don't stop and start the engine everytime you stop at a set of lights!

ZENER

spooky donkey wrote:

Well if it is writing to a folder then its still HD access.
Defragging is not much use when you are running win XP on ntsc.
I am looking into getting some HD fans, but the 24 /7 for a mohth was an expirment i wont be using it as mch in the future.

And my eye sight is fine despite every thing , thank you very much!

I'd say your eyesight is worse than you think what with watching that inferior NTSC stuff on yer screen !!!

Aside from the effects on your machine what about the other people using the system with a possible 48:1 contention ratio, also what download cap/penalties are you incurring ??

ZEN

Nevyn

Spookey and I have a IBB 1mg connection so there is no cap and we were told currently there are only 5 others in conntention with us.