HDD Activity when in Idle mode 2

[Barham]

I have had this problem for months:

There is hard drive activity when nothing is running. From what I can tell, explorer.exe is issuing lots of page faults.

I have tried the following:

Running Filemon
Running Process Explorer
Turned off all startup items
Disabled NAV
Disabled communications
Disabled System Restore
Turned off indexing
Played around with different virtual memory sizes
Killed ceepwrsvc which had a lot of activity
Tried all kinds of things suggested in other tech forums

I have:
plenty of free disk space, 37GB
512MB of RAM

Thanks for any help.

 

[ASG0856]

Well, windows does tend to run a 'quick' defrag to re-align startup files when it detects idle time.

If you suspect disk problems, have you run check disk? That will indicate problems if it fixes a lot of problems in its run.

What indications are there in the event log?

Have you run a disk clean up, then de-frag?

 

[Barham]

Thanks for your help. I have run check disk and de-frag. Also have run:

CC Cleaner
Zila Data Nuker
Ad-Aware
Spybot
MS Malicious Software Tool
Internet Window Washer Tool

I run Firefox and routinely clear out all browsing history

When the problem occurs, the disk light will stay solid for 2-3 minutes.

 

[cdogg]

What version of Windows are we talking about?

A little disk activity that "seems" constant is normal. Lsass.exe for example on my system is always requesting a read/write every few seconds, but the number of each is very low. Your system just isn't going to be completely idle unless you set windows to spin down the hard drive after so many minutes (look in the power settings).

If you're getting a lot of constant disk activity, then all I can recommend is getting your hands on a spare hard drive. Load a clean install of Windows and only install the apps that you use the most. Check disk activity after each one to narrow down the culprit. If the problem doesn't resurface after installing everything, then that's a good indication that your other Windows partition is infected with something. At that point, I'd spend the time reconfiguring the new install, format the primary drive, and clone from the spare back to the primary.

It seems tedious but trust me, you'll end up saving a lot of time in the end...

Good luck!


~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884