2014-10-06, 23:41
I've had a performance issue since upgrading to Windows 8 that I finally found the solution for. I was having intermittent buffering and performance issues with XBMC that I've found are actually external to the program due to the disk queue and 100% disk usage. On one of my Dell laptops, the sound would whine for a while and the system would appear to hang for about 20-30 seconds. On my NUCs the performance lag was less visible, but still there.
I run Chrome as my default browser and installed it when I installed Windows 8. What I didn't know is that by default Chrome sets the setting System->"Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" to default to ON. So if I ran Chrome, any extensions would still run as well as some Chrome processes which obviously were trying to access the disk drive. They would also autostart when rebooting Windows, even without running Chrome first. By turning this setting OFF, my disk usage went from 100% to 7-10%. No more buffering or performance hiccups. I didn't have (or least didn't notice) the problems under Windows 7.
It may be unique to my usage, but it's worth a try if you're having problems.
I run Chrome as my default browser and installed it when I installed Windows 8. What I didn't know is that by default Chrome sets the setting System->"Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" to default to ON. So if I ran Chrome, any extensions would still run as well as some Chrome processes which obviously were trying to access the disk drive. They would also autostart when rebooting Windows, even without running Chrome first. By turning this setting OFF, my disk usage went from 100% to 7-10%. No more buffering or performance hiccups. I didn't have (or least didn't notice) the problems under Windows 7.
It may be unique to my usage, but it's worth a try if you're having problems.
