hdd always being accessed ? what software ?

Snow-Munki · 8 Jul 2008 at 21:04

Hi,

it seems my new build of vista the hdd is constantly being accessed ( can hear it !! ) is there a easy way to find out what it is ?

checking system manager it's at like 95% idle process.

Any ideas ?

Thanks.

Cobertizo · 8 Jul 2008 at 21:08

Isn't that the system indexing everything so that the search function will work as designed? I hear that it's meant to calm down after a few days / week or so.

Greenlizard0 · 8 Jul 2008 at 21:17

Yeah mine was mental for a wee bit and then it calmed down. Thank god at the time I had my Raptors partially housed by some Zalman heatpipe coolers / silencers lol!

LeperousDust · 8 Jul 2008 at 21:45

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646.aspx
Try that, or try Sysinternals Process Explorer (or whatever its called) can't remember if it has that function too...

Although its probably the indexer

Don't do what you normally do and turn it off, because its there for a reason, and it'll do good once its got to grips with everything.

brendy · 8 Jul 2008 at 21:59

Why not just turn it off, services.msc and turn it off in there.

LeperousDust · 9 Jul 2008 at 01:10

brendy said:
Why not just turn it off, services.msc and turn it off in there.

Why not find out what it is first before you just go stabbing in the dark?

Snow-Munki · 9 Jul 2008 at 08:43

thanks very much guys.

It is a newish build ( 2/3 weeks ) and haven't been on that much. I'll try the tool and also perhaps leave it on overnight so it can complete the job.

bledd · 9 Jul 2008 at 09:45

disable system restore
disable defender real-time scanning

tweak the indexing settings so it only scans folders you want it to, leave it on though
leave superfetch on

brendy · 9 Jul 2008 at 09:55

LeperousDust said:
Why not find out what it is first before you just go stabbing in the dark?

How is it a stab in the dark?, its a non essential service which if turned off will show whether its the culprit.
I have benchmarked a lot of machines and on the boot partition the indexer is the main performance figure killer as it hits the drives, graphically you can even see the spikes each time it accesses the drive.

One last thing, tone down your responses, some people would almost think you were the only person with IT (and google) skills on this forum.

bledd · 9 Jul 2008 at 10:14

superfetch accesses the hd a lot more than indexing does (on boot)

but they're both better being left on

LeperousDust · 9 Jul 2008 at 11:52

brendy said:
How is it a stab in the dark?, its a non essential service which if turned off will show whether its the culprit.
I have benchmarked a lot of machines and on the boot partition the indexer is the main performance figure killer as it hits the drives, graphically you can even see the spikes each time it accesses the drive.

One last thing, tone down your responses, some people would almost think you were the only person with IT (and google) skills on this forum.

It's a stab in the dark because as already mentioned by bledd it could indeed be windows defender which is has RT scanning turned on as default on a vista machine, or maybe an antivirus, or god forbid, an actual virus. So instead of turning things on and off and seeing what happens, why not just use the software i posted to see what's actually playing with the hard drive?

Also you say performance killer, but thta depends on how you measure performance, if you count your PC being a little slower every now and then (mainly a cold start), when it boosts the time you open your most regular apps, I'd say that's a performance gain? Horses for courses.

bledd · 9 Jul 2008 at 12:00

you know this already Leperous, but he was talking about indexing, not superfetch..

(superfetch is what effects app opening speed)

LeperousDust · 9 Jul 2008 at 12:57

Sorry yeah, but same analogy to searching for files then when you need to effectively ,although i don't think i do this enough to warrant the performance "gains" either though

.