Hard Drive Activity ( Vista )

[Ryan Hayward]

I've noticed that since switching over to Vista, my hard-drive's activity
light is always
active. I've been told that its Vista indexing the drives or maybe the Disk
Defragmenter but
it really never stops, not even if the 'puter's been on for ages and is
idle.

Should I be concerned as I really don't want to go through a new hard-drive
so quickly....

Seems to be a big concern with a lot of other people too, if you do a google
search on
Vista hard drive never stops or similar.....

 

[The poster formerly known as Nina DiBoy]

I've noticed that since switching over to Vista, my hard-drive's
activity light is always
active. I've been told that its Vista indexing the drives or maybe the
Disk Defragmenter but
it really never stops, not even if the 'puter's been on for ages and is
idle.

Should I be concerned as I really don't want to go through a new
hard-drive so quickly....

Seems to be a big concern with a lot of other people too, if you do a
google search on
Vista hard drive never stops or similar.....

Try turning off indexing. See if that helps.

--
Priceless quotes in m.p.w.vista.general group:
http://protectfreedom.tripod.com/kick.html

Most recent idiotic quote added to KICK (Klassic Idiotic Caption Kooks):
"They hacked the Microsoft website to make it think a linux box was a
windows box. Thats called hacking. People who do hacking are called
hackers."

"Good poets borrow; great poets steal."
- T. S. Eliot

 

[Andrew McLaren]

Hey Ryan,

Vista is designed to perform a lot of processing and self-maintence in the
background. For example, defrag automatically kicks in when the system is
idle; Windows Update downloads and installs updates automatically; and the
Search Indexer will index new data and optimise indexes, also when CPU is
available (ie, system is idle).

So yes: a lot of disk activity even when the machine is unattended, is
normal with Vista.

This is actually a Good Thing - it means that your PC is actually doing some
useful work even while it is standing idle; instead of sitting there doing
nothing, until you press some button. It's better use of available
resources.

The only time you should worry is if disk I/O is associated with an
application you don't recognise. In Task Manager, under the Proceses tab,
you can add columns for I/O Read, I/O Write, and I/O Other. By sorting on
the I/O colums you can check which app is doing all the disk I/O. If it is a
process like System, CSRSS, or SvcHost.exe, there's no problem, this is
normal. If it is some process you don't recognise, it may be a virus. In
that case, update your signature files and run a full virus scan
immediately.

Hope it helps,
Andrew

 

[Lang Murphy]

I've noticed that since switching over to Vista, my hard-drive's activity
light is always
active. I've been told that its Vista indexing the drives or maybe the
Disk Defragmenter but
it really never stops, not even if the 'puter's been on for ages and is
idle.

Should I be concerned as I really don't want to go through a new
hard-drive so quickly....

Seems to be a big concern with a lot of other people too, if you do a
google search on
Vista hard drive never stops or similar.....

What flavor of Vista? What's your hardware setup? RAM? Video card and video
RAM? Video RAM dedicated or shared with system?

Lang

 

[Ryan Hayward]

Thankyou for your response and great advice.
I had a suspicion I had little to worry about but just wanted to be sure...