Maybe you know this scenario: You boot Vista on your laptop and start noticing that the hard-disk starts to whine and stutter after a while. It drives you nuts because you know exactly that Vista spins the disk up and down and up and down [and so on].
Description
There’s a lot of software out there promising a solution, much of it costs you a little and/or is too overloaded with other crap you don’t want/need. Thank god, there is hdparm for Windows (you need to install this tool if you want to use the service!) as well and it works reasonably well with Vista.
Now, due to Vista’s UAC putting a batch calling hdparm into your startup folder is not so easy, it’ll prompt you for elevation every time you start the machine. Also, when hibernating/waking up your laptop the changes have to be redone.
I was a little sick of that and wrote a very simple service that will do nothing but call hdparm, set -B and -S values and waves you goodbye. After hibernation/sleep the service will do the changes again. So you’ll lose the ability to park your disk every 15 seconds but who cares?
Prerequisites
- .net Framework 2.0 or newer
- hdparm for windows
- Access to an account with administrative privileges to install the service.
License
The program is free, open-source software and can be used, modified and distributed freely in any form and environment (including business/corporate use) as long as you offer the source-code along with the program free of charge.
Downloads
This time around there’s two packages:
- hdparmservice1001_bin is the binary-only package of the service containing a nice installer that’ll copy the files to %PROGRAMFILES%\hdparm\bin (so you better install hdparm there!)
- hdparmservice1001_src contains the source-code to the program. There’s not much to see, though. The service is really simple and was done in about 5 minutes so don’t expect any wonders from it
.
Version History:
- 08-20-2008: Small fix that should address the wake-up issues that I overlooked.
- 05-29-2008: First version for public consumption.
This fix should be posted on the MS Download Center main page! One quick question: On Vista x64, I had to copy/paste my ‘hdparm’ folders from ‘program files (x86)’ to ‘program files’ in order to install the fix. Then I copied your files back to the original ‘hdparm’ folder (/program files (x86)/). I also edited the hdparm.XML to match the proper location. Is that adequate to ensure your fix will still work?
[quote comment=""]This fix should be posted on the MS Download Center main page! One quick question: On Vista x64, I had to copy/paste my ‘hdparm’ folders from ‘program files (x86)’ to ‘program files’ in order to install the fix. Then I copied your files back to the original ‘hdparm’ folder (/program files (x86)/). I also edited the hdparm.XML to match the proper location. Is that adequate to ensure your fix will still work?[/quote]
Yes, as long as the xml configuration has been altered to reflect the changes, it should work without any problems.