excess harddrive access when idle

[redss]

I've been noticing that often my computer harddrive is constantly being accessed when I've been away from the computer awhile (screensaver is active).

Upon checking the task manager I see that within the top line, ("system idle process"), for every second that passes, the CPU time is incremented by 1 second, which is the same instant that I hear the harddrive being written to.
(its a laptop so the harddrive accesses are clearly audible, and its running windows XP).

Isn't there a way to get that process to write to RAM so that when I am away from my computer for hours, the harddrive won't be constantly accessed, thereby wearing it out faster? I'd like to leave my APM set so that the harddrive will stay on, just not moving & writing...

 

[btvillarin]

You might want to download and install <A HREF="http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml" target="_new">Filemon</A> (free) to see what's getting written to disk. Once you find out, get <A HREF="http://mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml" target="_new">Startup Control Panel</A> to help disable the app that's causing this problem. Yeah, MSCONFIG is available, but this program is a bit simpler, and robust at the same time.

If you have Diskeeper, make sure it's not set to defrag on idle (or whatever option is similar).

Merry Christmas!

Bryan

<A HREF="http://btvillarin.com/mojo/mojo.cgi?f=list&l=newslttr" target="_new">BTVillarin.com Newsletter</A> - Computing tips and stuff
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[gothitbycar]

You probably have the indexing service active. When your computer is idle the files are indexed and maintained making searches faster and yada yada.

To disable: Go to search, click on change preferences on the left hand side and go to (With indexing service) then click on the no button, see if that works.

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Add witty comment here and beat this bad boy...
A64 3200+ w/ 1 GB DDR 400
2 36 gig raptors in Raid 0 complemented by an AIW 9800 Pro

 

[TKS]

make sure that you actually WANT the indexing service disabled too...if you disable it, your searches will slow down considerably. I have mine disabled since I pretty much don't give a crap about searching...it seems to have sped up things in XP quite a bit.

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<b>It is always brave to say what everyone thinks. </b> <i>Georges Duhamel</i>

TKS