5,400 RPM Harddrive Massive Bottleneck?

The **** HDD light is always on and sometimes Windows get really slow, its not my ram considering I have 400+ megs free and its not my Core Duo because its only at 10-15% usage while my HDD light is constantly on.

I defrag weekly, what gives?

Its annoying the living hell out of me.

No spyware either and not many processes (31).

 

Could you give a bit more details about what you are doing when the hard drive light is on all the time? You should not have 10-15% CPU usage if your system is idle. Open the Task Manager, then click the CPU tab and see what is taking up time.

Also, if you could tell us what sort of programs you use for antivirus/antispyware, that would be helpful too.

 

could be that windows just "disk-indexing"?

cheers ...

 

Whenever this happens to me I strongly suspect spyware and you will need to run at least two different spyware programs to really catch it. Even if you do find it and remove it, you need to reboot and rerun them again to make sure it did not reinstall itself.

 

Open My Computer, right click on your disk and click Properties.
Once there, un-check the Indexing option.

This makes a bit slower the file searching process, but I don't think you use it that much. You'll see a big change in performance. Or at least, your drive won't be working all the time.

 

Also you can disable system restore. Not sure if you are willing to take that risk, but having the computer back up every single little change to the HD can be a total waste

 

I have had the Indexing Service stopped ever since I got my laptop.

I have also had System Restore disabled ever since I got my laptop.

I use AVG for Anti-Virus, but its never running unless I want to scan.

I have none of the Resident scanning options in my Spyware apps either.

Sometimes it happens in firefox, or when I exit a game.

Also sometimes just for having 3-4 apps open.

And I just upgraded to 2gigs of RAM today.

 

Tips: reformat your whole notebook after RAM upgrade.
After reformatting, install the newest drivers of your notebook and make your notebook ready to use.
After that download Diskeeper to automatically defrag your documents.

That's all I can tell you.

Charlie

 

I use Auslogics Disk Defragmenter.

I dont think I need to reformat after doing it for the first time on my desktop it really isnt such a big deal. Thanks!

 

Check for spyware and viruses. There may be some driver issues. A reinstall is the best bet. Just be careful to backup all the drivers and reinstall only the ones you need.

 

btw guys how do i disable system restore??
disabling system restore and indexing seem to be two good ways of improving performance...jeez i learnt something today !!

 

Right click on My Computer, click the System Restore tab, and check Disable System Restore on All Drives box.