how to decrease hardrive activity?

i just noticed that my hard drive is alot more active in windows than in linux and i am concerned , i noticed that from the blinking of the hard drive LED , can anyone tell me a away to reduce hard drive activity? , i just reinstalled windows so there is no crapware , should i reduce virtual memory or increase it ? will i feel the difference ?
please help me

 

You have nothing to worry about. Vista is merely using Superfetch. The hard drive activity will subside soon.

 

Umm, turn the computer off?

 

@shyster1
do u think it didn't come to my mind LOL
i need my computer always on , as i need it for my work

 

Superfetch and indexing use your HDD a lot when you first install Vista. After a few days, it should subside.

 

I've had my Dell Latitude E4300 (specs in sig) for a couple days now. It had a lot of activity to begin with, especially after installing a few things and adding all my gigs of music and pictures.

Things have calmed down considerably. Though I think it will be a few more days before everything is peachy. I must say though, despite the "HDD activity," my system is much snappier than my previous Inspiron (in sig as well). It's as if the activity isn't affecting my day to day usage.

 

Well, the idea in Vista is that a few days of extra HDD activity make the rest of your computing days faster!

 

silly superfetch / indexing / HD thrashing that takes days and then solves itself.

there is only one way to handle annoying windows features.

disabled, disabled. disabled.

 

While they're annoying to some, they're not to others. They might even be, dare I say it, useful to some.

 

I don't mind them. My boot time is super fast. None of said features reduce system performance or stability.

 

I had similar HDD over-activity at idle taking my HDD temps upto 63C(idle!!! ) Ambient temps are quite high here 37-38C

Scanned with antivirus and antispyware and found nothing(ESET NOD32 and Malwarebytes)

Then just disabled the pagefile as I have 4GB ram and the HDD activity stopped. (now HDD Idle - 50C)

 

Disabling the pagefile, even with 4 GB of RAM, isn't a good idea. You should AT LEAST keep it at a small value (500 MB or so).

 

Thanks! will allot 500mb asap!

EDIT -

@ OP - You can try this too - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=309217

 

If you've disabled superfetch, then you really are suffering from a disability.

 

This is why I like to benchmark my computers. Too often increased HD activity, increased Memory usage is equated to slower overall performance. Too often they are not directly linked to each other.While there are alot of writeups on thrid party benchmarking, I prefer to use the builtin Performance Monitor to establish a baseline I can run test scenarios against. It allows for more accurate conclusions than testing by the frequency of your HD LED.