TSGL: Hard Drive Thrashing

[Don Penlington]

At 10:41 AM 10/27/2007 -0400, you wrote:
>My hard drive keeps
>thrashing every now and then for a reason I can't figure out.>>

How often, and for how long?

There could be any number of reasons, it's hard to say without more 
accurate info.

Most likely something set to auto-update---do you notice the internet or 
firewall (not XP's firewall as it's incoming only) icons flashing? Could be 
spyware/trojans trying to send info out. Run some spyware scans.

Could be an internal scan--check all your antivirus/spyware progs for 
scheduled scans. If you have several, they would appear to be random.

You could check XP's event log (assuming you have XP and event viewer is 
enabled) to see if there's any activity reported. It may not make a lot of 
sense to you though.

Run Control Panel/Scheduled Tasks to see if any regular scans are 
scheduled--you should also check each program's options also for scheduled 
scans.

Run Task Manager/Processes/View/Select Columns and check Page Faults. You 
may see from that column which progs are active--but don't be alarmed if 
you see large numbers of "page faults". These seem to be quite normal as 
far as I can make out. It's just XP checking in and out of virtual memory 
as it goes.

Certain background utilities may monitor various parts of the system, but 
these should not be generally very noticeable--perhaps just an occasional 
flicker.

Try taking everything out of Startup (not just the Startup folder but all 
registry startups as well) and see if this makes any difference.

Don Penlington


 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
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