Hard Drive Activity

[cwin]

My comp is in the same room as me, so when i go to bed, i hear it.
One thing thats been annoying me recently, is:
After about 10-20 mins, my had drive will either pulse with activity. Quite quietly, each pulse is about 5 secs apart and lasts one sec.
Or it will go bonkers! Really loud heavy hdd access!

I run over, switch on my screen, and nothing is on it.
When i move my mouse... it all stops within a minute

I have run AVG Pro, Adaware, Spybot S&D, all fully updated... nothing. Fast indexing service is off and i have no scheduled tasks. This happens even when disconnected from the net, and no servers or net apps running (like ZAPRO)

[Rocketmech]

You have Diskeeper 7 running Smart Scheduling ?

[cwin]

nope
dont have the prog

[BipolarBill]

Try disabling the Indexing service. System Restore may be responsible for some of this too.

[cwin]

As i said, i have disabled the indexing service. I mistakenly called it the fast indexing service , ill try disabling system restore

[timwill]

This is the exact thing mine is doing. See "Hard Drive Going Nuts" thread in this column...
The difference is that my drive starts going nuts about 1 minute after the last mouse movement. Moving the mouse settles things down but it returns again after the mouse sits idle for another minute.
If you figure this one out, you will fix mine too. I will watch the thread for something to come along.

[cwin]

Oooooh... i see that thread
Im despratly gonna try and fix it! Im having trouble sleeping cause of it

List of comp annoyances:
#1 (5) Hard drive noise
#2 (1) Fan Noise
#3 (3) Windows (ive realised windows causes #4 + #5
and more!)
#4 (-) Incompatibility
#5 (2) Crashes

[timwill]

I know what you mean. I can hear that drive, as quiet as it is, all over the house. I must be sensitive to it going nuts and that is why the sound seems so bad when it really isnt. It gets so annoying that I just turn off the computer.
Good luck and if I ever correct mine, I hope you are looking at the board cause I will be making it clear that the problem is finally gone.

[Rocketmech]

Does Task Manager Processes Tab reveal any service / cpu usage ?

[cwin]

when its happening, i cant look at the cpu usage
or it stops

didnt happen at all last night

[holoflux]

It stops when you move the mouse? - power management setting maybe - could it be going into standby?

[cwin]

nope... all off
if i get to sleep, when i wake again, comps normal

[kneurotik]

This EXACT same thing happened to me last time. Drove me bonkers trying to figure out why the HDD was emitting so much sound.

Turns out that (I know this sounds amateur-ish) the HDD was dying due to wear and tear ie. physical defects. Run Scandisk to confirm this. Unexpected bad sectors (in a clean history of HDD health) would be a telltale sign.

How old/new is your HDD? Mine was a 2-yr old Maxtor when it happened.

[Byte Doctor]

The long, heavy HD access is probably just Windows resizing the swap file/page file. What happens is when you stop using the computer, Windows decides you don't need all of the virtual memory it has been allocating while you were using it, and shrinks the file. As soon as you start using it again (like to see wtf it is doing!) it stops the process and waits to see if you might need the virtual memory again...

This used to drive me nuts in Win95 when it first came out until I discovered that I could stop it by setting the min/max virtual memory sizes to the same setting. Make sure to set it large enough or you'll end up getting virtual memory errors. I set mine to 1024MB (hey, HD space is cheap and it doesn't hurt to have too much virtual memory since it only uses what it needs...).

I also found that it works well to either disable virtual memory completely (in Win9x/ME) or shrink it to minimum (NT/2K/XP) and do a full defrag, then set the virtual memory to the desired setting. This allows Windows to create a nice, contiguous, unfragmented file.

Regards,

Byte Doctor

[cwin]

only got my comp march