so I bought a new vista laptop, and every time I go above 1gb ram (I have 2gb installed, and it is recognized in the BIOS and in windows) it starts to pagefile instead of using the other 1gb of RAM, any ideas?

maybe vista decides to start pagefiling early? if that's it I'd be quite relieved

No, Vista wouldn't jump to page file at a 1 GB cap. Try taking out both modules, and run your laptop with one stick. Then move that stick to the other slot. Now you will know (for sure) that the module works, and that both slots work. Then repeat with only the second module. If all of those configs pass, I don't know.

ok what I thought was windows pagefiling is actually the disk "stalling". in the performance monitor, whenever vista stalls, the disk reports 100% highest active time,with absolutely no other activity on the disk. what exactly does this mean and how can I fix this?

and I thought of reseating the RAM but I'd rather try something that wouldn't void the warranty first

bump, help?

okay, I can see how it is superfetch. I thought it might be but then I read somewhere it was only on startup. but superfetch shouldn't be stalling my drive, should it? what is the drive doing? is it because tit's not fast enough? (5400 RPM).

disabling superfetch doesn't stop the problem, it even happens on startup.

when the disk is at 100% there are no updating processes, just old ones that eventually fade away till the disks stops stalling. when it starts working again it has alot of requests lined up that usually change between stalls, so it is hard to know which process might even be possible to be the culprit.

in the event viewer/windows logs/system I see a few errors that look like they might be related:

The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period.

source: iastor
event ID: 9
task category: none

there are quite a few of these and they are all the same

sounds to me like a bad hard drive, assuming IDE is generic for all sata/ata devices

EDIT: seems like it's a bad storage controller, I'm going to update the driver for it and see if it solves any problems when I get home

still getting the same error, it seems to correspond to when the disk stops stalling.

I actually found a rather strange resolution, I turned off turbo memory and changed the SATA config to ATA from AHCI, and I've not had any stalls in the last hour or so the comp has been running.

I had done a SMART diagnostic earlier FYI (although I did not mention it) the disk was at 100% fitness.

EDIT: laptop has been working fine with no freezeups for a day, seems safe to call it fixed.