SABnzbd Forums

Is anyone aware of any problems Sabnzbd may have with Windows 8.1? My girlfriend just bought a new Asus laptop with a Core i5, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 1 TB HDD and it runs fine as long as Sabnzbd isn't downloading anything, once Sabnzbd starts downloading a lot of things the HDD activity spikes and the OS slows to a crawl.

One of three things is always consuming the most bandwidth: Sabnzbd, Sickbeard or Svchost

I don't have much experience with Windows 8 because I use Linux, but when I have used it I don't like it very much.

A hard disk is always the bottleneck in any laptop (except when you have an SSD).
But mostly so during substantial repairs of a download.
Be aware that SABnzbd (and any other download program) is perfectly capable
of saturating your WiFi connection.
We recommend a network cable for serious downloading.

Other than that, SABnzbd should hardly make a dent in the performance of such a laptop.
One more check: the article cache on Config->General. Make sure it is at least 500M.

The odd thing is that Sabnzbd worked perfectly fine on her old laptop which was about 5 years old (Core2duo I believe with 4 GB DDR2 probably) and running Windows 7. I was using an ethernet connection and would get around 7 MB/sec. IIRC her article cache size was at 200 MB, I'll tell her to increase it to 500 MB to see if that makes any difference.

Just to clarify, this isn't a problem with network speeds, it's a problem with the OS lagging like crazy, as if all the RAM was being used.

How active is SABnzbd according to Window's Task Manager?
(Memory and CPU time).

She lives two hours away so I couldn't tell you right now, but from what I remember, it wasn't that high. Just the disk activity was high.

I really don't know.
What trashes the disk a lot is an extensive repair job, not just downloading.

Yea, it's a really odd problem. Maybe the HDD in this laptop is slower/worse than the one in her old laptop, who knows.