Crazy Hard Drive

[ggbroughton]

hello, i have an acer aspire 5551-A laptop and recently i have noticed that the HDD seems to be reading and writing around 20X more than it used to. Does anyone have any ideas on why this is APART FROM RUNNING PROGRAMS?

i have not installed any additional programs to this windows 7 machine for around a year now and the activity of the HDD seems to be incredibly higher than a sane speed. defragmenting the hard drive in this operating system seems to not do anything at all not even defragment the drive. is this one of those things where i absolutley have to reformat the drive and start over? Hopefully next time with linux ubuntu and windows XP as seven is easily as bad as vista in my opinion.
also i have heard my registry might have somehow become corrupt so im guessing im kind of screwed anyway.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

There are several windows services that can cause this behavior. The indexing service for searches is one.

If you are concerned about your registry you could give CCCleaner a shot. It's good at cleaning up your machine from temp files and bad installers that have left data or registry keys kicking around. If you are concerned about it deleting things that you don't want it to there is an an analyze button that will show you all the changes it's going to make.

Personally when my machine starts to see the standard Windows slowdown I back everything up and do a fresh install.

 

[sminlal]

Start Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc)
Click the "Performance" tab
Click the "Resource Monitor..." button
Click the Resource Monitor "Disk" Tab
Click one of the column headings to sort by highest process.

That should tell you what's using your drive.