Possible Hard Disk Problem With Acer 5102

Hi,

I bought an Acer 5102wlmi last September and I have always noticed that the hard disk seems to be unusually active even when the laptop is left alone with nothing running. It makes noises as if it is writing or reading to the disk, but it is not "thrashing" because it happpens in small bursts every few seconds. Sometimes the IDE bus LED flashes, at the same time and sometimes it doesn't. I've never known a PC to do this with Windows XP, not even an old machine with less RAM. I've tried disabling services like indexing, and the task manager does not show anything hogging the CPU. I thought that it might have been caused by the Acer performance utility but I recently reinstalled a fresh copy of Windows XP and it did it again from the start. Could it be that the disk is somehow faulty? It's lasted OK so far, but like I said, I have never know a PC to do this to this extent. My warranty expires in a few months so I don't want it to fail soon after that.

The drive is a 100GB IDE 5400RPM model but I'm not sure what make.

Thanks,

James

 

Disk usage in windows is not a sign of a bad or malfunctioning hard drive. A failing drive will not have more disk usage than a healthy one. What a failing drive will do is freeze up ur computer and make grinding noises.

So it's not ur actual hard drive being bad, it's a process in windows that is accessing your drive at an unusual pace. So find whatver is doing that and disable it. It could be a virus/spyware scan, it could be something updating iteself in the background etc...

 

The hard disk gets used all the time in Windows, even when the computer s not doing anything and is sitting on idle. So long as the disk doesn't make loud noises, and doesn't cause any stability problems, I wouldn't worry about its activity in Windows all to much.

 

Thanks for the replies.

I don't think it could be spyware or a virus that's doing it because I reformatted and installed a fresh copy of Windows and it did it again right from the start. It is never connected to the Internet so it's not automatic updates or anything.

I would be really interested to hear from other people with exactly the same configuration as me. I don't think the hard drive I have is a Seagate so it would be different to Adinu's. I will try to find out what make it is.

Part of the reason why I'm concerned about this is because I would like to buy a new PC and sell my laptop and I don't want to give reason for complaints.

Thanks,

James

 

I never said you had a virus or spyware. I was just saying that possibly an antivirus software was scanning for them in the background, or a program was scanning for software, causing the HD to be accessed.

You need to first check your running processes and the msconfig tab in order to determine it's not windows accessing ur HD.

But like I said before, these symptoms have nothing to do with drive failure, so you're not giving away a bad component. This is purely software/OS related, so that's where you have to look.