Another "Delayed Write Failed" message!

[Juan handed]

I have just switched over to AVG anti-virus a few days ago. I have had this message box pop up about 20 times since then:
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Windows-Delayed Write Failed

Windows was able to save all the data for the file C:\Documents and Settings..........The data has been lost.This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network conection.Please try to save this file elsewhere.
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The file in question is always a different one.

What is happening? what should I be doing?

thanks.

 

[root]

it's caused by disk caching.

go to my computer.
right click the c drive
select properties,
go to the hardware tab
select the physical disk
click properties
go to policies
uncheck the box that says enable write caching on the disk.

this will prevent this error as there will be no more delayed writes to fail.

 

[Juan handed]

Part 1:
OK,I just made the correction.Do you think it had anything to do with the newly installed AVG antivirus?

What are the pros and cons for caching?

Part 2

This morning,I check the laptop,which had outlook express and IE running the night before... and my sreensaver was on,the taskbar was missing,the cursor wouldn't activate anything,left click,right click...nada.Messed with it for a few minutes and hit the power button,no response.Leaned on the power button for about 20 secs...nothing.Tried again,again leaned on the button for about 30 secs...it shuts down.

I give it about 2 minutes,hit the button the windows screen pop,s on for a few seconds,then I get a bunch of lines about some sectors(not sure) being
unreadable.

Then I get line after line about orphaned files and I guess their new locations.Also something about Phase 1(not sure) complete,Phase2 and Phase3.Stayed frozen like that for10 minutes,or hours-I don't know,I had to leave for work.

12 hours later I get home and check the computer,I didn't shut it down,and everything is back,taskbar,wireless connection,everything ready to go.

What do you make of this,and is it related to the Delayed write failures?

 

[root]

Part 1,

possibly could be something to do with AVG doing real time scanning of the data going to the disk, but I've not really experienced this problem before... perhaps once or twice, but I'd never considered that it could be due to AVG.

The pros and cons of caching are just about write speeds, basically if you write 100MB to a disk it'll take an amount of time, Disk caching just means that it'll start writting the file to a disk, and cache the parts of the file that are not written to the disk immediatly and carry on silently writing the file to the disk.

The pro's are a marginal increase in disk activity performance, the cons are that if there is a power cut you could loose data as some data may still be cached in volatile memory that'd be wiped in the event of power failure.



Part 2,
It sounds like the computer crashed, or became unresponsive, though I couldn't tell you why.
orphaned files, would be files not properly committed to the disk, and yes, this could be related to disk caching.
the disk clean up probably looked like it wasn't doing anything because it was actually doing a lot, and there was no indicator to tell you that the status was moving. or the indicator was moving so slowly that you'd think that it wasn't doing anything.

 

[Juan handed]

Turning the caching off has really done the trick.This laptop is running SO much cooler and faster now.The fan was maxed out much of the time prior to this and sometimes it was 'fry an egg hot'.
What explanation is there for caching to cause the computer to labor so much? And is that a sympton of another problem?

 

[jmacavali]

I just had this problem. My was an external hard drive that the power got disconnected to but the USB was still plugged in. As soon as I unplugged the USB they quit popping up.