HD Access Every Second

[seacue]

This nearly-new computer running XP Home flashes its disk-access light every second. The Windows Task Manager shows the System Idle Process at 99%. Ever so seldom explorer.exe will take 2%. But this is whether or not I'm using either Windows or Internet Explorer.

Nothing else seems to take any resources. My guess is that explorer.exe runs every seconds tick - and this often requires a disk seek with an audible "tick". I've defragged the HD and that reduced the audible seek tick.

I seem to be an unwilling life-tester for the disk's head movement mechanism.

What, if anything, should I do?

Thanks,

seacue

[Tarq57]

When you look at the processes in task manager, is anything there consuming an inordinate amount?

[seacue]

Markjoy,

As I said, the Idle process is using 99%. That drops to 98% when explorer.exe takes its 2% ever so seldom. I suspect that explorer.exe actually runs every second, but not at the instant that Windows Task Manager is looking. I don't see any applications running.

Baffles me.

[Toxteth O'Grady]

Temporarily disable your anti-virus and see if it still happens.



TOG

[Gertrude the Wombat]

I had that on an NT box once.

Tick, tick, tick ... once a second ...

We (both me, as a software engineer, and the firm's IT department) never did find out what it was.

[IO540]

I once spend ages on NT4 trying to trace this. There is a freebie program called FILEMON which shows you which bits of the HD are being accessed. Windoze writes to the registry every second, roughly, and also accesses something on every hard drive that's installed even if it is used only for data not related to windoze itself.

There is a lot of stuff on the web about how to reduce this HD activity. One starts off disabling various network printer broadcast etc processes, and one can get rid of most of it, but not all.

I think XP must do something different on laptops otherwise their HD would never be able to power down.

[FakePilot]

I have this problem too. While not finding anything conclusive, it at least appears harmless.

And I had this the moment I installed XP. So I don't think it was an infection or something I installed.

Also, some searching reveals that NTFS checkpoints every few seconds.

My work machine has both Linux and XP, however it doesn't seem to do it.

[boguing]

I think you'll find that the regular disc accessing is the system 'indexing' files in the backround so that it is permanently aware of what and where everything is. You could disable it in Windows 2000, but it's not a good idea really because when the system is asked to find a file it will then have to go and do it while you wait. Probably can disable it in XP too, but I haven't looked.

BUT. System idle process is a misnomer. It's not a process. It just means that the system isn't doing anything! 'System Idle' wouldn't confuse half as much would it?

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Originally Posted by boguing

BUT. System idle process is a misnomer. It's not a process.

Whenever I've written an operating system the system idle process has been a fully fledged process (with an address space, a stack, a thread and so on), even though the code consists of a couple of instructions which don't, as you say, actually do anything, and the stack will be the smallest amount that can be allocated.

There are all sorts of good reasons for doing it this way, starting with avoiding potentially horrendous special case idle code in the scheduler - so much easier just to schedule a real live genuine, but low priority, idle process.

[W.R.A.I.T.H]

That's windows XP, allright? I've had this thing on all XP machines as far as I can remember, and this my new babie, one month old straight from the line, has made sure this nasty habit is not foreign to it either. It's probably got to do something with indexing of the HDD, as boguing pointed out, and laptops are no exception to this, unfortunately. Methinks all XPs in the world do this by default, and it only depends on how quiet HDD and sound insulated case that you do or not know about it.

Funny thing was, a mate of mine, a hard core unixman, would always rant about me being an XP sissy and why don't i migrate, saying Linux would never do what I haven't asked for. Now I have Gentoo at work and not only the thing digs on the hard drive like mad every now and then, but it beats windows to it hands down .

[Mac the Knife]

Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services > Indexing Service

Turn it off

[frostbite]

I'm sure this 'unattended' HD activity has been going on on my computers since the days of W3.x.

I learned not to leave a computer running overnight near my bed because it kept waking me up.

[seacue]

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions.

Other priorities have kept me from doing anything about the "feature".

seacue

[tallsandwich]

Just scanned this thread quickly, and as no-one has mentioned it then I will add:

If your system is very low on memory (physical RAM) then paging will occur even due to just operating system processes (there need not be a user installed application actually doing anything).

Ok your PC is new so I would expect that a good amount of RAM is there - did it all get seen at memory-check time when the bios starts at boot up? A duff memory card in a new PC would not be unheard of and would cause lots of paging.

You don't always get an boot-up error when a memory card is not seen/fails, just less memory is displayed and who checks that every reboot?