SOLVED New laptop, slow HDD, annoying touchpad...

[Aldakoopa]

I just got a new ASUS K55N laptop with an AMD A8-4500M APU, 4GB 1600MHz RAM, and a 500GB 5400RPM hard drive. I've already ordered another 4GB stick of RAM to upgrade that, and I'm very tempted to upgrade the slooooooowwww and noisy HDD to the SSHD I have in my desktop because I've been really happy with that drive... but I don't want to put that much into it. I'm also trying to get used to Windows 8, and with the two-finger scrolling (more on this below) it's not so bad.

Anyway, I had read complaints about the touchpad not being that great on the laptops and I didn't have any issues with mine for the first couple of days, but yesterday morning I got up and the two-finger "ASUS Smart Gesture" technology wasn't working... so I reinstalled (actually it "repaired" them) drivers, and it worked again. Well, Now I woke up again this morning and once again, "Smart Gesture" isn't working. I reinstalled the drivers again. What would cause drivers to go bad overnight?

I leave it in sleep mode overnight, but this morning I noticed it was on... and doing something. I probably wouldn't have noticed except for the HDD was making noise when I woke up. It's actually still running. According to Task Manager the only thing using the HDD so much is "Service Host: Local System" which has abouy 14 or 15 sub-processes that are all eating up my HDD bandwidth anywhere from 80-95%, which might actually be the reason my HDD is so slow if it's constantly running like that... but what the is it doing so much with it?

 

[Aldakoopa]

The heavy disk usage finally stopped, I guess that Service Host finished whatever it was doing that was important enough to wake up my computer for.

 

[dostov]

I'm guessing auto-backup or antivirus scan for the disk usage...?

Also, did you reboot after you "repaired" the touchpad drivers?

 

[Aldakoopa]

I have to reboot to finish repairing the drivers, but just rebooting without repairing drivers doesn't work.

 

[Aldakoopa]

I left my laptop like I did the past two nights in sleep mode, but this time not connected to the internet. The touchpad still works fine today. Maybe it's some kind of automatic updates that are messing up the drivers. I'll try disabling any kind of automatic updates and see if that helps.

 

[Aldakoopa]

Ok, I switched to my favorite antivirus AVG instead of the McAfee that was pre-installed and it seems to leave the hard drive alone. I've also upgraded the RAM now and all in all I can't really complain about performance now, and most of what I use the laptop for now stays open since I have more memory. The trackpad issue came up a couple more times, but I figured out I can just restart the Asus Smart Gesture service and it fixes it without having to "repair" drivers and restart the computer, which is much more convenient now that I've figured that out. On top of that, I haven't had the issue lately. (knock on wood...)