Vista HDD access issue

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes anyhow.

I own several computers, all of which run XP except for my primary desktop which I use Vista on. Ever sense I first started using vista ever couple of hours or so my HDD will start being accessed by what I assume is some hidden 'feature' in vista, and will continue to grind away for between 5-15 minutes. This bothered me somewhat cause I knew it was hard on my HDD, but not so much that I was willing to change OS's. But today I decided i'd like to try playing some games (Unreal Tournament III, Crysis, Gears of War, etc.) on the machine. All was well and good for the first few hours of play and then that dreaded HDD accessing began. Immediatly the game I was in (UT3) froze, and a few minutes later it crashed back o the desktop. Afer the accessing was over I went back to playing again. Several hours later the accessing began again and my comp then crashed and BSOD.

Has anyone else had this same issue and could tell me a way to fix it? I'd like to have at least one comp with Vista on it, but I'm not going to put up with something like this.

 

Go to sysinternals.com and look at the drive monitor apps there. Diskmon and Filemon will allow you to monitor what apps are using the hard drive an what files they are accessing. The Process Explorer will let you see what processes are running and the % they are using the CPU.

Gary

 

Disable indexing service in Vista and see if that helps.

 

Its not hard on your HDD.
Technically, the single powerup/powerdown ages HDD more than several hours of continuous activity.

Vista designed so idle resources not wasted, like when HDD is unused it uses it for some speed up tasks (reorder, index, preload, etc). This is done to reduce *future* HDD access and increase the future responsivness.

Of course, it will not be done in power saving mode.