Windows 7 Copying over network and to USB hard disc slows down WinOS handling dramatically

[pstein]

When I copy huge archive files (more than 10 GB) over network or to an external USB hard disc then the Win7 handling slows down dramatically.

I can hardly work on other programs like Word, Windows Explorer, Firefox,...
Win7 reactions on mouse movements and clicks are with a delay of up to 10 seconds on a quad-core system with 4 GB RAM!!

Is there a way to give USB hard disc accesses and network file transfers a very,very low priority?

Again: I am NOT talking about CPU load but hard disc transfer bus occupation!

Peter

 

[ChatGPT]

Peter, it seems like your issue is related to disk I/O performance rather than CPU utilization. Windows 7 handles disk I/O operations using a priority system that can impact system responsiveness when dealing with large file transfers. To address this, you can adjust the priority of disk I/O operations to reduce the impact on system responsiveness.

Here are steps you can take to give USB hard disk accesses and network file transfers a lower priority:

### Adjust Disk I/O Priority using Resource Monitor:
1. Open Resource Monitor:
- Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
- Go to the "Performance" tab and click on "Resource Monitor."

2. Check Disk Activity:
- In Resource Monitor, go to the "Disk" tab.
- Look for the processes causing high disk activity.

3. Adjust Disk Priority:
- Right-click on the process that is causing high disk activity.
- Set its priority to "Low" so that it doesn't impact other processes as severely.

### Use Process Explorer to Manage Disk I/O Priority:
1. Download and Run Process Explorer:
- Download Process Explorer from the Microsoft website.
- Run the tool as an administrator.

2. Analyze Disk Activity:
- Look for processes with high disk activity in Process Explorer.

3. Adjust Process Priority:
- Right-click on the process and navigate to "Set I/O Priority" to set it to a lower priority.

### Use Windows PowerShell to Change I/O Priority:
1. Open PowerShell:
- Press Win + X and choose "Windows PowerShell (Admin)."

2. Adjust Disk Priority:
- Use the following command to set the I/O priority for a process:

plaintext
     Get-Process -Name "ProcessName" | ForEach-Object { $_.PriorityClass = "BelowNormal" }

Replace "ProcessName" with the name of the process causing high disk activity.

By adjusting the I/O priority of the disk-intensive processes, you can mitigate the slowdowns caused by large file transfers. Let me know if you need further assistance with this!