Excessive hard drive activity

[cedar street]

I have XP pro on a newer HP laptop. Boot up seems to take too long,
and once the machine is running, the HD appears to work excessively for
about 10 minutes. After that period, the machine stabilizes, although
it still seems a bit slow.

Here are the items that I've done to help remedy this problem:

1. XP Pro, 1 gig of ram
2. msconfig, and un-checked all programs that should not be allow to
start at boot.
3. Run PCtools registry mechanic regularly
4. Run windows defender
5. Run spy bot SD regularly
6. Run adaware SE personal regularly
7. McAfee security center installed and running in normal mode.
Routinely run the virus scan.
8. Defrag and clean up regularly

Task manager/processes shows a lot of svchost.exe entries that seem to
use up memory in a random, sporadic fashion. Usually, about 46
processes are working under normal circumstances.

What other items might make the HD work so hard?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Rajeev]

At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to
construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of
Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can
contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run,
depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of
services permits better control and easier debugging. you can try
tasklist /svc to see what are the applications started .

regards
Rajeev

 

[cedar street]

At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to
construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of
Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can
contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run,
depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of
services permits better control and easier debugging. you can try
tasklist /svc to see what are the applications started .

regards
Rajeev

Thanks. When I go to run and type in this line: tasklist /svc

c:\taskList.txt a see a command window pop up for a split second and then it disappears, so I can't see what the started applications are. The same split second command window pops up when I type in tasklist /svc. any further thoughts?

Thanks

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

You cannot run those commands from Start/Run because there is no module active to display the results.

Go to Start/Run and type CMD and press OK. This will bring up the command emulator. Type your Tasklist commands in there.