Constant Disk Access

jester77

I did a fresh reformat of the hard disk at the weekend for my laptop. I installed XP SP2, along with AVG, Ad-aware, Spybot, ms antispyware, spywareblaster and zonealarm. I update all these softwares and ran the tests. Nothing unusal.

However since I've done the reformat there is a constant hard disk access every 2 seconds, really distracting and bugging me like you wouldn't believe. The only other applications I've installed are Thunderbird and Firefox.

Laptop hard disk was ok before the reformat even though it was full of junk. Shouldn't be a performance issue as the machine is a 2gh pentium m with 1 gb of ram. Hard disk is 80gb.

Any ideas?? I've disabled the indexing service but it made no difference.

Khannie

Something caching? Or the AV software? Findfast? (god I hate that)

Sully

Sure the AV Software and the MS AntiSpyware do scans of your computer all the time. Thats what it is id say.

Try closing down all programs that are loaded, idle, and see.

jester77

I'll try that this evening.
It's driving me nuts. Hard disc is normally quiet when it's in use, just a soft faint whirling noise, barely audible. But this is like a loud click every 2 seconds. I used AVG before the format so maybe it's the anti-spyware software. Would rather put up with with spyware crap on my PC than listen to this :mad:

irlrobins

Loud click? Sounds a physical prob with drive to me

zoro

Khannie wrote:

Findfast? (god I hate that)

Findfast was the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title aswell - but if you're hearing a loud click (is it like two coins hitting off of each other lightly?) then it's likely to be a hard drive crash.

In which case, back up EVERYTHING you need, and buy a new hard drive.

Simple as ...
Unfortunate though

Oriel

jester77 wrote:

But this is like a loud click every 2 seconds.

Be thankful you got a warning. Get a new drive, reinstall windows and copy all the data onto the new one. Throw this one out.

S.

jester77

Think I described it poorly! I'm familiar with to soon to die hard disc sound. This is more like a loud half a second drive read/write, more of a crunching sound that a click... still not a very good description

How do you disable Findfast?
I had disabled the indexing service, thought this was it!

zoro

The indexing service is just that.

The crunching sound that you mention is just normal disk access. But if it's happening VERY frequently then I'd look into quite a few things.
First and foremost, indexing service - which you've already disabled (not just turned off ... actually disable it!).
Then there's the massive amounts of services that are likely to have been installed over the period that you've had windows installed. Disable as many as you can, that you know can
Is AntiVirus set to actively scan any new or changed files?
Have you scanned for spyware?

usernameguest01

perhaps you should look at setting your page file not to resize dynamically.

Assuming your using Windows XP, go into the control panel.

Open system and select the advanced tab. In the performance area, select settings.
A new window should open. Click the advanced tab. A new window will open, the custom size radio button should be selected.
There should be two text areas under the radio button. Allocate twice the amount of physical memory you have on your machine into the initial size text area.
eg. if you have 512mb RAM put 1000 into the text field.

Now put the same number into the maximum size. While these are the same, windows wont constantly try to resize the page file. Click set, then ok.

You will need to restart your machine. Hope this helps.