Hard Disk is Threshing

[Jerry Criswell]

For some time now I have had a problem where, apparently at random, my hard
drive starts running and ties up my laptop to the point nothing will run.
This lasts anywhere from 5 to 18 minutes. I have not been able to
reproduce this on purpose, but yesterday it happened 3 times when I started
either Outlook or Foxfire. Today it happened when I tried to sync my PDA.
I have tried to turn off any indexing I can find, but no help. It doesn't
always happen every day, but will do it several times a week. I am running
on a Toshibe Satellite laptop with Vista Home Premium. Any ideas?

Thank you for your time.

JC

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

For some time now I have had a problem where, apparently at random, my
hard
drive starts running and ties up my laptop to the point nothing will run.
This lasts anywhere from 5 to 18 minutes. I have not been able to
reproduce this on purpose, but yesterday it happened 3 times when I
started
either Outlook or Foxfire. Today it happened when I tried to sync my PDA.
I have tried to turn off any indexing I can find, but no help. It doesn't
always happen every day, but will do it several times a week. I am
running
on a Toshibe Satellite laptop with Vista Home Premium. Any ideas?

Thank you for your time.

JC

Normally I would suggest that you check for disk fragmentation and run
cleanmgr (from Run) (to clean out the internet files), but this behavior is
unusual and I would download the disk manufacturer's drive test software and
check the drive if these two steps are ineffective.

 

[Peter Foldes]

Have you checked if indexing is running at this time

 

[Jerry Criswell]

How much RAM do you have. It could be page thrashing if you have less
than 2GBs. The other possibility is that the system writes a lot of
error reports. Go to "Problem reports and solutions" in System
Maintenance and then "View problem history" (in the left pane) and look
how many reports were sent and whether the times coincide with the times
of your problems.

I do have 2 Gig, but where is System Maintenence? I didn't find it in
Accesories, Control Panel or with a search.

JC

 

[Jerry Criswell]

maybe a utility program running on a set schedule? such as defrag? or
maybe a virus scanner?
system mechanic slows my pc to a crawl when it runs.
if you think you are low on RAM, you can reclaim some by disabling as
many startup programs as possible.
if you need tips on how to free up more disk space and RAM, just ask.

I do have System Mechanic, but it always has the little window up when it
runs and I can cancel it if I choose. It doesn't lock up my machine or
slow it down. How do I stop/change that operation by the way?

JC

 

[Jerry Criswell]

Given that we have now proposed a lot of different possible causes, you
may want to run Process Explorer ( 'Process Explorer'
(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) ) at the
time of the slowdown to see which processes are most active.

I have downloaded this program and I will give it a try. Normally I'm
unable to do anything when the problem occurs, so we will see.

JC

 

[Jerry Criswell]

Have you checked if indexing is running at this time

It is my belief that I have indexing shut off, but I'm not sure how to be
positive about that.

 

[Jerry Criswell]

Keep Process Explorer running in the background. Then you can bring it
up immediately when needed. If you click on "CPU" on the top of the PE
window, then all processes that use CPU time will be listed first. That
makes it easier to decypher.

Thanks for the help. Been out of town. In the meantime I upgraded
ZoneAlarm and haven't had disk threshing since. Hmmmmm.