harddisk working like mad after some idle time; what is it?

Hardware/software:
Laptop, XP with Servicepack 1 and all patches installed

Sometime ter my laptop has been idle for some time (without any user
program running), the harddisk always starts working away like mad. I
usually become aware of it by the sound of the drive and the drive
light coming on. As soon as I move the mouse or touch a key, the
harddisk will stop working.

My suspicion is that the system is doing some "routine work" it
consideres necessary, such as disk defragmenting or building some
index, but I really don't know.

What is it doing? Does anyone out there know what this is about, or
how I could go about diagnosing it (nothing unusual shows up in the
task manager process list) .

Thanks,
Wolfgang
California

rnott@nospam.ilternet.edu (Wolfgang) wrote:

>My suspicion is that the system is doing some "routine work" it
>consideres necessary, such as disk defragmenting or building some
>index, but I really don't know.

That is done in such idle phases, also the index service may re-scan
the drive if the Indexing Service is up and running and you set up
Windows to index your drives (setting in the Properties of the
drives).

--
(tm)

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 22:52:49 GMT, rnott@nospam.ilternet.edu (Wolfgang)

>Hardware/software:
>Laptop,

May also mean OEM underfootware, then

>XP with Servicepack 1 and all patches installed

All patches not including SP2, then? :-)

>Sometime ter my laptop has been idle for some time (without any user
>program running), the harddisk always starts working away like mad. I
>usually become aware of it by the sound of the drive and the drive
>light coming on. As soon as I move the mouse or touch a key, the
>harddisk will stop working.

>My suspicion is that the system is doing some "routine work" it
>consideres necessary, such as disk defragmenting or building some
>index, but I really don't know. What is it doing?

Possibilities that come to mind:
- screen saver ot code hooked into that, e.g. some av
- building prefetch info to guide future Defrag
- XP's indexing service, which is off by default
- System Restore housekeeping
- activity initiated by or related to a peripheral, e.g. printer
- activity initiated by or related to network or Internet
- active malware
- other 3rd-party software


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