Why so much hard disk activity when opening programs?

Diss

Diss

Diss

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Joined
28 Oct 2002
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1,510
Hi

Recently whenever i open a program in winXP i get a long bout of disk activity before it opens - can't see any reason for this as cpu usage is normal and no obvious culprits. Once the prog is open it works fine.

Any idea's what might cause this and how to fix it?

thanks

Diss
 
Couple of instant solutions that may or may not help.

How much have you got opening with windows at startup?

Hows many programs are running in the background that dont need to be?

Whats the fragmentation like on your HDD? May need defragging.

Short of that, I'd stop all non-critcal services booting, defrag your HDD and build from there.
 
Further to the above, if you have many background programs and fragmentation combined with resident virus protection, you can really get a compounding effect on caching.

Added any new progs that have a persistent resident component like a quick-startup? Some of those can be more mem intensive than others.

EDIT: oh and any new progs that might be bit less professional? maybe something is not deallocating mem properly?
 
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Definately worth checking if you're running low on memory as that would cause more disk-caching to occur and would especially be more apparent when opening a program

Right-Click Taskbar -> Task Manager -> Performance

check the figures at the bottom of that tab under Physical Memory (K)


Sounds a lot like your disk needs defragmenting though
 
thanks all

tried your suggestions but no luck

i then did some more digging and found a program called filemon which shows all files as they are accessed

turns out that Zone alarm (VSMON) is the problem - i had a very large .exe file (1.7gig) on my desktop that it checked through which caused all the activity - i thought this was specific to desktop but it also did it with another large .exe file that i had on a separate partition - both of these .exe files had very recently been used to install stuff

anyway, i deleted them and problem seems to have gone away - very odd

thanks

Diss
 
That is strange... because ZA AFAIK doesn't "scan files" for anything (with exception of spam filtering and the like)... just stealths the ports and plugs the leaks.
 
ditch ZA

use xpsp2 firewall, use a router, then use common sense, you won't need AV at all, so pc will fly
 
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