XP: Why do my hard drives get periodically accessed? (1 Viewer)

[Martin Rendall]

On an idle system (but logged in), every few minutes, the harddrive(s) do a bunch of seeking. It's annoying since I want to power them down with the power management features to reduce noise, but they keep spinning up again.

It's not indexing as that is disabled. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Martin.

 

[Max Leung]

It could be spyware...download Lavasoft's Adaware to clean out your system!

Also, Windows System Restore runs every now and then to save system changes. It's really annoying when it kicks in when watching a DVD on the PC...stutters for a moment as it merrily takes over the PC. You can check your System Restore settings by running the System control app from the Control Panel. Disable it for drives you don't want "backed up".

 

[Martin Rendall]

Max,

Good ideas. The machine is used for surfing only, after a fresh OS install. But you never know. And the system restore stuff would still be on. Good call.

Martin.

 

[Max Leung]

BTW, did you do a fresh install of Windows XP SP1? Or just Windows XP vanilla? If the latter...that could be bad! My friend and a coworker reported receiving a virus within MINUTES of hooking up a newly installed XP vanilla O/S to the internet (no hardware firewall in place). A total disaster!

 

[SethH]

Could also possibly be caused by real-time virus protection.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Even after all those things are addressed, I wouldn't be surprised if XP still hits the hard drive and prevents power saving from kicking in. Some worker thread in some process will wake up, and it will allocate or free some memory, and then the virtual memory manager is going to want to rebalance things and in doing so will hit the page file, thereby waking up the hard disk or at least resetting the timer so that it never sleeps.

 

[Martin Rendall]

Wayne,

I'll just remove all the virtual memory!

Martin.

 

[Francois Caron]

It may be the anti-virus. Grisoft's AVG does scan the computer's critical OS files and directories for problems following a period of idleness. This happens to me regularily on a machine that's thoroughly scanned for viruses and spyware on a regular basis. All that's usually found by Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D are tracking cookies. AVG always finds nothing.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Open the task manager and look at the processes tab. Go the view menu and choose Select Columns. Add PF Delta to the list. Then wait for the suspect disk activity to occur and see which process is generating all the page faults.

 

[Martin Rendall]

Wayne,

That works too. I'll do that this weekend. Thanks!

Martin.

 

[MikeSHU]

Don't bother killing yourself over this like I did. XP does this and it is unown why. I have tried a fresh install, disable every service I possible can, disabled virtual memory, all logging, and still it acesses my drive for a reasons beyond me.

 

[MikeSHU]

I raped google trying to find an answer to this. There is none.