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    Who or what is accessing my hard drive?

    Discussion in 'Gateway and eMachines' started by fiziks, Oct 18, 2008.

  1. fiziks

    fiziks Notebook Evangelist

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    Got a P7811FX. Even when I appear to have nothing running, my hard drive light flickers. Who is doing it? I removed the page file altogether and it still flickers. I opened task manager and added all the I/O and page fault columns and the only thing that appears to be using any I/O is the task manager. How am I supposed to conserve energy and cool down the hard drives when something keeps hitting them. I have a couple of Thinkpads with XP loaded with all sorts of crap that don't exhibit this behaviour. Is this specific to the Gateway preload? Or is this something to do with Vista?
    Thanks,
     
    fiziks, Oct 18, 2008
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  2. DestruyaX

    DestruyaX Notebook Evangelist

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    Vista has a ton of indexing and "Speedfetch" type processes which keep your hard drive busy.

    As for the "no page file" thing...you have a 200GB hard drive and the provision to add more space in the future. Not all Windows programs are perfectly coded. Some have memory holes in them. This is what a paging file is for. Set aside at least 2GB of space and use one. =/
     
    DestruyaX, Oct 18, 2008
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  3. Jakamo5

    Jakamo5 Tetra Vaal

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    you forget, you appear to have nothing running, but you have an entire OS running. where's the OS located? on your HDD. Don't let the light flickering bug you, it's perfectly normal.
     
    Jakamo5, Oct 18, 2008
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  4. BlackSheep5

    BlackSheep5 Notebook Consultant

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    Disable "Superfetch" in services and see if that reduces it a little.
     
    BlackSheep5, Oct 18, 2008
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  5. Syngensmyth

    Syngensmyth In All Seriousness

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    Fn-F1 turns the lights out and it won't bother you. :p
     
    Syngensmyth, Oct 18, 2008
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  6. fiziks

    fiziks Notebook Evangelist

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    I went out to www.sysinternals.com and downloaded their ProcessMonitor tool. (FileMon doesn't work in Vista64). I see plenty of activity going on, but the thing I see the most is ccSvcHst accessing registry keys, almost always under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces
    even when I physically turn off wireless access (and I don't have any LAN cables plugged in). One has to wonder why?

    Wouldn't it make sense to cache these values? Or is this part of security, constantly checking these values to see if something nefarious is changing them? It seems to me that there are less intrusive ways to do this.

    One of the key concepts of operating system performance is to limit disk access as much as possible. Even more so when power consumption is an issue. It seems to me that some folks at MS need to take some rudimentary OS performance concepts classes.
     
    fiziks, Oct 18, 2008
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