Hard Disk Activity Light going Crazy when at Idle

[bloodandsoil]

After I login to Vista my hard drive activity light is still going crazy after like 15 minutes. What's up with that? My programs have all finished loading and I'm just sitting there idle and the hard drive activity light is blinking like crazy.

I have 4GB of memory, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, a GeForce 8800GTX video card, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive. It's a very very nice system.

So what the hell is Vista doing?

Edited to Add: This is Vista 64-bit Home Premium

 

[leexgx]

that be system restore the Vol shadow copy service will be doing that (probly stuck in an loop if you got more then 100gb in your user space) it does give up some time later on

you could turn off system restore 99% of the time it does not work any way and there is an 60% chance it Brake windows useing system restore (when you use the revert back option)

it norm does this at 3am the shadow copy (does this even if your not useing Vista Ultima)

other thing it could be is Windows defrag

 

[bloodandsoil]

How do you turn off System Restore?

 

[Scotteq]

The other thing to check is if you have Indexing turned on. Shut it off if you don't like the HDD churning while the system indexes it.

Also, if you have 2GB of ram, a flash drive may help by giving Vista a more room to pre-cache data.

 

[tolittletime]

or you can just put something over the light....

if its blinking its because windows is working in the background.

 

[LoneEagle]

The best way to know what the HD is doing is:
1) Start "Task Manager"
2) Under "Performance" tab, click the button "Performance" (at the bottom).
3) Click the header "Disk". This will open a list of current used files.
4) You can click on column header read or write to sort it.