Hard disk churning

Cantab.

Why is my hard disk continuously churning? It's really annoying. I've tried Ctrl, Alt, Delete to kill all non-essential processes, but it's still continuously churning and spinning...

It's driving me demented. Could it be spyware or some software scanning my disks without my knowledge? I hate Windows!!!

Ruu_Old

Ah Windows is great. How old is this churning hard drive?

Cantab.

It's about 3 or 4 years old (connected to a pentium 4). It's not the age I'm concerned about (sounds like it's working correctly), rather the software that's making it spin like a maniac all the time...

Any suggestions?

christophicus

IT could be or mabey your pc is constantly paging the the HDD?

how much ram have you got?

Cantab.

Hi everyone and thanks for the helpful replies.

I've got 512MB installed and I'm only using Firefox!!! The process monitor indicates I'm only using about 20MB of RAM...

christophicus

Odd. IT does sound like you may have some form of virus/spyware. Try avg ,spybot and adaware scans.

DublinWriter

Try optimising it. Or you could have insufficient physically memory making Windows keep using the swap file.

christophicus

Thats what i meant by paging, but he said he has 512 MB and is only currently using 20MB.

Ruu_Old

Try defragmenting and see if it helps any.

TerrorFirmer

I have a similar problem, even when just idle on the desktop it sounds like my HD is always being accessed. Can't find anything specifically wrong with it either, and it doesn't affect games or programs, its just rather annoing...and its been like that for about 12 months!

trout

I had similar issues, but only when I booted into XP ... turns out the Indexing service was running in the background, busily trying to index 200 Gb of data

As soon as I turned off the Indexing service ... normal service was resumed ... worth a try.

christophicus

What dos the indexing service do?? YOu dont need it when your system starts up then?

Ruu_Old

christophicus wrote:

What dos the indexing service do?? YOu dont need it when your system starts up then?

Its meant to speed up access to finding your files, meant to shorten the time needed to search for the file but the constant indexing does take its toll on the system. Unless you perform many, many searches then you can turn it off.
You don't need it turned on for system startup.

Go to My Computer", right-click on all your hard drive partitions one at a time, left-click "Properties". Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching". Select "Apply changes to subfolders and files".

christophicus

Cheers man . Will this speed up the time during the pc startup when its in windows and everthing is just loading?

Ruu_Old

It should make things a little less laggy(if there is such a word) alright.

christophicus

Ok cool thanks man.its done now(took a while for all of the files to be ammended though).