Hard Drive activity

[the K]

Is it normal for the hard drive to be constantly active? While looking at a
web page, without clicking any links, I notice that the hard drive light is
continually flashing. I also noticed that the CPU usage went as high as 50%
when I was simply viewing a web page. What might be the cause of this? I ran
a virus scan with NOD 32 and it came up empty.

 

[Unknown]

Look in task manager to see what is running.

 

[the K]

For instance when all I have running is Mozilla and I'm not downloading,the
Process Monitor application shows numerous read/write attempts by:
winlogon.exe
lsass.exe
firefox.exe
sqlmangr.exe.

Can anyone explain why these application are running when all I'm doing is
viewing a web page?

 

[Twayne]

Is it normal for the hard drive to be constantly active? While

looking at a web page, without clicking any links, I notice that the
hard drive light is continually flashing. I also noticed that the
CPU usage went as high as 50% when I was simply viewing a web page.
What might be the cause of this? I ran a virus scan with NOD 32 and
it came up empty.

It's probably normal; hard to say for sure since we can't see your
computer from here. It could be one of many background tasks ranging
from file indexing to antivirus to malware scanners to ... you name it.
YOu're the one who knows what you have running. Or you should, anyway.

I would suggest however that you look into some security research for
your PC. Microsoft has some good articles as do some of the participants
right here on this group. Peraps someone will chime in with a list for
you if you ask. Or, since I mentioned it.
NOD32, while good, is not anywhere near all you need to protect your
machine. Or just look back thru old threads here for posts on the
subject; there are lots of them. If all you have is NOD32, you have the
basics, but you are still woefully unprotected from many things on the
'net.

HTH

 

[Plato]

Is it normal for the hard drive to be constantly active? While looking at a

Not unless you have installed a program that is continually has to
access it. Can be as simple as a printer update app.

 

[Alec S.]

the K wrote (in

For instance when all I have running is Mozilla and I'm not downloading,the
Process Monitor application shows numerous read/write attempts by:
winlogon.exe
lsass.exe
firefox.exe
sqlmangr.exe.

Can anyone explain why these application are running when all I'm doing is
viewing a web page?

Sounds normal enough. First of all, there will pretty much always be continual
file access, even with a system that is completely idle.

Second, 50% CPU usage is normal when viewing a web page unless you are viewing
pages from 10 years ago. Any pages from these days, especially Web 2.0 type
pages (YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.) will use JavaScript, Flash, etc. which use up
CPU cycles. Even just rendering today’s pages takes up CPU cycles. FireFox gets
quite nasty once you start adding extensions to make it useful; I’ve seen it
suck cycles often. Even without extensions it will check for updates and such.

Finally, I would suspect that sqlmangr.exe is responsible for some of the CPU
and disk usage. It sounds like you don’t even know about the SQL Server Service
Manager running on your system. Why is it running? Are you running a web server
or something? I don’t believe that it even comes with Windows (I doubt that it
is part of the IIS or PWS). You may want to turn it off.

(The other two are system processes and will have file access; that’s to be
expected, unless they have /massive/ file access when the system is supposed to
be idling.)


HTH

--
Alec S.
news/alec->synetech/cjb/net