Continuous hard disk activity

[snoopysbuddy]

I had a problem with Vista 64 where the hard disk wouldn’t stop
churning. And the incessant cranking was driving me insane. I tried
disabling the search indexer as well as about a gazillion services and
processes but to no avail. Then I noticed in the performance monitor
that system was doing an awful lot of work for no particular reason.
So I thought maybe it has to do with the virtual memory pagefile.

I tried defraging but that wasn’t going anywhere cause all that
activity prevented defrag from running correctly. So what I did was
go in to system advanced settings and unchecked the box for letting
windows manage virtual memory. Then I specified a pagefile of 2gb (no
particular reason for this number. it just seemed like a nice round
figure). And as soon as I applied the changes, the churning stopped,
which freaked me out cause I thought I had broken windows. But it’s
been several days; the computer is working just fine; the hard disk
isn’t churning; and I still have my sanity. So my guess is that the
memory pagefile was seriously fragmented and when I specified my own
settings, windows created a new unfragmented pagefile.

Hope someone find this info helpful.

 

[Dale White]

Open up Task Manger and then click performance and then click resource
monitor and then click on disk and sort on Reads. Should tell you where all
the action is.