hard disk won't stop turning after 98-XP upgrade

[stevot]

Hi there,

I upgraded from 98SE to XP home yesterday. Somewhat surprisingly everything went smoothly, almost... The problem I have is that the hard disc won't stop - on/off, on/off, with a period of less than a second. This is affecting performance as well as being really annoying to listen to.

I ran norton SD (2002) with no effect, indeed the partition is still 73% fragmented. I will run MS defrag now.

any ideas what's going on, and how I might get around it? Reading the posts in this forum, it seems as though I'll be best doing a fresh install.

Thanks,

Stevo

 

[linney]

It might be the Indexing Service causing this disk access. Have a look at this site and see what services you can disable safely.

http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

 

[gargouille]

Creative devices also do polling of the hard drive that's caused it on other systems.

 

[CompuByte]

I would have to say your problem is MEMORY .. You did not state how much ram your system has? or how much Hard Drive space is left on the hard drive. I have run into this problem with clients here at work. and what has always worked is either adding more memory , and if none on hand. changing the size of there PAGEFILE which is in XP the part of your hard drive that the system uses for extra memory. it sounds like that is what it is doing. and why it keeps ascessing your hd. MAKE the pagefile BIGGER. if you have the Hard Drive space. and would REALLY be interested in knowing how much Ram your system has (memory)

 

[naiku]

I get similar hard disk activity on my PC, however I did a fresh install of XP, I have 512Mb of RAM here so don't think its a memory problem.

I do have a Creative soundcard though which has caused problems and so am wondering if thats the cause here.

 

[gargouille]

To compubyte's post I would add to make the swap file (if you're gonna' change it) the same max and min...this may minimize resizing and stop the constant access.