Hard Drive Constantly Working

[BenVitale]

Any suggestions on what could make my hard drive constantly be working?

I've tried the obvious things like turning off indexing.

I use Norton 360 for protextion and I'm on Windows XP.

[dtm32236]

i'm guessing that you mean that your computer keeps loading and loading, even when you're not doing anything?

try checking your processes... go to windows task manager and click on the Processes tab. Then sort it by CPU (highest one first).

the first one should be 'System Idle Process, and this should usually be from 95%-99%. This, I believe is the percentage of power the CPU is using for each task.

If there's another process besides the Idle one that's really high, this file is your problem.

if you don't recognize what it is, Google the process name and see what application it belongs to. If it's nonsense (a spyware file or something) you know exactly why this problem happens, and what program to remove to get rid of it.

i hope i explained that clearly....

[BenVitale]

If i have any background jobs that use memory, could i be swapping out memory onto disk. If i only have 500 MB or 1GB and something running, would that do it?

[dtm32236]

you mean in a paging file?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314482

[BenVitale]

Yes.

[Sunny G]

:o I'm sorry, but this possibly could mean that your hard drive is going to kick the figurative bucket, and buy the figurative farm. But that's just a guess (figuratively, of course:p)

Tell us.... What type of HD is this? How old?

[BenVitale]

Besides investigating what processes are running on my PC, constant hard drive activity can also be a sign of excessive swap file use.

In other words, Windows is trying to run all the processes I may be running in RAM memory, but it cannot because I don't have enough. So it uses a swap file on the hard drive - constantly. That's the way i see it. Correct?

[\\.\]

1. How much Ram do you have? XP requires a minimum amount of ram even if its not using it all! I have 512Mb of Ram in my system and it is just enough, you really need to aim at 1 Gig to give yourself enough overhead.

Power saving...

Go into your "Power saving" settings and switch drive to turn off after say 10 mins use.

If that does not cause the drive to spin down then you have a bug and need to update.

Quickest way to open up power save properties is to :-

Right Click Desktop, select Properties
Display Properties, Screen saver Tab
Click Power button...

Make changes, Apply and click OK.

[BenVitale]

Thanks for your input.
I'm trying to get a screen print of the processes from Cntrl, Alt, Delete

It doesn't seem to want to print. I've tried a "PrtScn" and paste into both Word and Photoshop and it doesn't want to do it.

However, I can say that it list 56 processes but the only one listing a lot of CPU use is "System Idle Process", 89.

Pentium R4 CPU 3.06 GHz, about 18 months old
I've got 2Gb of RAM

[BenVitale]

I'll just run by you of what i was told. Here it is:

"You have too many processes running -- 56!!! Ideally you would have so few processes that you wouldn't even need a scrollbar in the Processes window"

And

"Go to Start => Run, and type msconfig. Under the STARTUP tab, uncheck as many of those items that you can bear... especially suspicious are items with no name or a name like asdfrt or spyserv, adcheck, etc. You can also uncheck things like qttask (quicktime), realsched (realplayer), msoffice, waetherbug, etc.

You can practically get rid of every single one of these... some things can stay, like Norton or your printer (HPsched, for example if you have a Hewlett-Packard printer). They are just little pre-start programs Windows executes every time you boot the PC. You're not actually removing or deleting anything, you're just preventing wieldy sub-processes from cluttering your CPU's time (and causing eye pollution on your taskbar with those annoying little icons). When done you will have to re-start the computer. If necessary, check the box "Don't remind me/don't show blah blah" that pops up upon restarting.

Now notice that when you hit CTRL ALT DEL there are much fewer processes there. Manually hitting "end process" only ends that process for now; when you re-boot it shows up again unless you removed it from MSCONFIG as shown earlier. Now that you've removed many more processes, you should have less background activity.

Oh, and all this assumes that you are using malware protection... You mentioned you have Norton, but frankly Norton is anathema to a lot of techies... It's invasive/pervasive, fights for resources at a low level, over-polices other processes, and tries to pre-empt too much... kind of like America on foreign soil... I've run across cases where, despite all cables and connections and lights testing positive for internet connection, a user still could not connect... removed Norton and the problem was fixed.

I'd recommend 2 separate (and free) malware prevention programs -- Ad-Aware (not Adware!) and Spybot Search & Destroy. Also, a solid free antivirus program is AVG. If you visit any legitimate techie site or google forums for info on these, you'll find they are highly praised. Many of those unknown or unnamed processes you unchecked in MSCONFIG above are viruses, worms, trojans, and other malware which spy on you and communicate with their evil masters, causing unnecessary background activity.

Good luck. As a side benefit to doing this cleanup, your computer should also startup quicker and run faster overall. Infections can bring the fastest processor to its knees."

What do you think?

[\\.\]

Add SpywareBlaster from Javacool to your list, it is also free.

It wont hurt to remove the clutter either, but if your drive is in constant use... That either signifies a bug in the drive power saving and will require a patch from M$, spyware or a trojan and yes, Norton is a pain in the A. My Brother-in-Law, all his fellow security consultant friends like himself ALL steer clear of the "pile of junk" as they refer to it. Their was a time when "Norton" provided a suite of useful tools but now they only invade your PC with ****e. No other word for it. My Sons rocking horse would need to go for a dump before I would go near that crap again, I speak from experience of being hacked while running Norton myself.

I have run AVG & ZoneAlarm for nearly 8 years and never had a problem since, many people will say that ZoneAlarm is bad and other issues that they drag out of thin air when in reality they're talking outta their butt cheeks, theirs nothing wrong with ZA other than those people don't understand the architecture and that it is only doing its job when it prohibits access in or out of your PC. This year ZA has prevented 281,466 intrusion attempts on my PC and I'M behind a hardware Firewall and NAT! Proof in itself that you shouldn't just rely on hardware firewalls or NAT's

AVG is one of the best bits of programming I have seen in a long while and very effective as it protects your system in several ways and too in-depth to go into here but AVG has saved my PC too many times from Trojans and Malware, not from my stupidity but because I use peer to peer programs where you find lots of nasties like Trojans.

You have nothing to lose in clearing out the clutter.

Good luck.

[EJMAES1973]

"You have too many processes running -- 56!!! Ideally you would have so few processes that you wouldn't even need a scrollbar in the Processes window"


Why would that be the reason for the issues? I have 63 processes running and only use 1%-4%, and my hard drive is very rarely accessed.

[\\.\]

Think this may help : http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50944 with your system snapshot