ATIH Build 6597 slows my system to a crawl

This is my first post to ATIH forum, so apologies in advance if I get some stuff wrong as far as the purpose of this forum may be concerned or if this post is too long.

My immediate issue is that my system has slowed to the point of being unusable under Build 6597 of ATIH 2011 whilst Acronis is either imaging my hard drives or doing file backups. Oh, and my backups are now slower. More on this further below.

Another issue is that Acronis support seems to be largely based around its user forums. Searching and finding your way around these and the Acronis knowledge base to track down issues can at best be frustrating and often fruitless unless the problem is a fairly simple one. More on this below as well.

My final issue is that ATIH 2011, whilst being excellent software in general, still contains, as at Build 6597, too many bugs to provide a nice user experience. Acronis works fine for me (except for the current build slowing my system to a crawl when it is running) but there are also still lots of other annoyances in this Acronis build that should probably have been ironed out before ATIH 2011 was ever first released.

I purchased ATIH 20011 in late August 2010 (Build 5105).

Until then I had for some time been using Maxblast 5 (which is a cut down version of Acronis, available free to Seagate/Maxtor hard drive users) to create my hard drive images, with success. As Maxblast was crippled so that only full drive images could be made or restored I finally purchased the full version of Acronis because of the favourable impression I had formed of Acronis whilst using its Maxblast version.

Not long after installing my purchased version of Acronis my system began crashing with repeated BSOD’s, every day or two, cause, file klif.sys. To cut a very long story short the problem seems to have been the interaction between Acronis builds 5105 and then 5519 with my then latest subscription version of Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite which I was using as my anti-virus and firewall.

Sadly, because Zone Alarm support works the same way that Acronis support seems to, it took over a month and the installation of Kaspersky anti-virus and fire-wall to fix my problem (ZA use a licensed version of Kaspersky in their product). The cause of the issue seems to have been a backup script that was used in these earlier builds of Acronis that referenced an ancient version of Zone Alarm’s product.

In builds of Acronis prior to 6597 my XP Pro system was reporting that it had many dozens of backup scripts that were being kept in the \Local User\Application Data\Acronis\Backup Scripts directory. One of these was a file called zonealarm_6_5.xml which is the likely culprit that caused my BSOD’s whilst using Zone Alarm together with these versions of Acronis. Incidentally, in my currently installed ATIH Build 6597 this directory no longer contains any backup scripts at all:-)

Changing my anti-virus and firewall software fixed my BSOD problems and I haven’t had any since installing Kaspersky, which seems to like to play nice with Acronis. But I guess my point is that this issue was probably caused by Acronis scripts that were either out of date or didn’t need to be installed on my system at all.

So, having vented about product, support and useability issues, on to my immediate problem, Build 6597 slowing down my system.

Under Build 5519 I could carry on working whilst Acronis was backing up. I now can’t.

Looking at what is going on with MS Process Explorer whilst Acronis is running on my system overall cpu usage is fairly low, ranging from around 24 to 40% being used by Acronis whilst a backup is running.

However, in a backup run TrueImage.exe can get up to 20 or more deferred procedure calls in any one-time instance and more than 180,000 reported page faults for the whole backup. This example is whilst Acronis is imaging a relatively small, non system, internal hard drive of approx 160gb, less than 30% of which contains files or data to a Western Digital 320gb USB external drive.

My symptoms are that screen refresh becomes non-responsive ie scrolling may take minutes and trying to open new applications takes even longer. My backup performance options settings are unchanged at low as they were under build 5519.

It’s only when Acronis starts to show that my backup is around 106% complete (another as yet un-remedied and un-documented ‘feature’ of ATIH 2011) that I know relief may be close at hand and I can shortly get on with some work.

I am not a technical person but looking at the dpc’s and page faults that are being reported I’m not really surprised that my system goes to a crawl and the backups take longer under this build. And no, nothing has changed on my system between the last build and this one. And yes, I am running the latest versions of everything under XP Pro, SP3, fully patched etc.

Does anyone else have a similar experience? If so have you found/fixed it’s cause?

Or do we have to wait for the next build which may/or may not fix this and the slowing down of backups in general under Build 6597?

TIA

Toot