Hard Drive Running Constantly - Win2K-Pro

[Gordon]

This is a new (clean) installation and it seems as if
the hard drive is running all the time.

I checked the Windows Task Manager and there is
one process, svchost.exe running in multiple instances
and has a high CPU usage at times.

I checked Google and this appears to be a common
problem (I hope) but I am not clear about the solution.

Is there a solution for this?

Thank you

Gordon

 

[philo]

This is a new (clean) installation and it seems as if
the hard drive is running all the time.

I checked the Windows Task Manager and there is
one process, svchost.exe running in multiple instances
and has a high CPU usage at times.

I checked Google and this appears to be a common
problem (I hope) but I am not clear about the solution.

Is there a solution for this?

Thank you

Gordon

Some system specs would be helpful...
For example, if your machine does not have enough RAM there may be constant
harddrive activity due to the pagefile being accessed.

In general 128megs of RAM would be a bare minimum for win2k...
but 256megs or more would be desirable.

If it's an older machine with a slow harddrive... 128 megs will not be
enough


It's normal for there to be several instances of svchost.exe running...and a
typical memory usage would be

5 - 20 k

Do you see any process taking considerably more than 25k of memory?

 

[Gordon]

Some system specs would be helpful...
For example, if your machine does not have enough RAM there may be constant
harddrive activity due to the pagefile being accessed.

In general 128megs of RAM would be a bare minimum for win2k...
but 256megs or more would be desirable.

If it's an older machine with a slow harddrive... 128 megs will not be
enough


It's normal for there to be several instances of svchost.exe running...and a
typical memory usage would be

5 - 20 k

Do you see any process taking considerably more than 25k of memory?

Hi Philo,

a. The system has 256 MB RAM. Swap file at 500 - 750MB.

b. Memory usage I have seen as high as 26k but most are as you
said 5 - 20 k.

c Without any applications running I just counted four instances of
svchost.exe running.

d. CPU usage is mostly around 1 - 5% - but I have seen it go as high
as 95%.


Gordon

 

[philo]

Hi Philo,

a. The system has 256 MB RAM. Swap file at 500 - 750MB.

b. Memory usage I have seen as high as 26k but most are as you
said 5 - 20 k.

c Without any applications running I just counted four instances of
svchost.exe running.

d. CPU usage is mostly around 1 - 5% - but I have seen it go as high
as 95%.


Gordon

With 256megs of RAM you should be plenty good
all I can think of would be to open up taskmanager and see if anything has
spiked up
to correspond with the high cpu usage

 

[Poutnik]

With 256megs of RAM you should be plenty good
all I can think of would be to open up taskmanager and see if anything has
spiked up
to correspond with the high cpu usage

I would suggest monitoring disk operations
with utility ProcMon by Sysinternals ( now MS ).

First try to use filter with usage
"operation contains writefile" as monitored action.

Some apps like logging all the time.
or some desktop searches or indexing services makes indexing.
if unsuccesfull, try other possibilities, procmon is feature rich....