HD Activity light on continuously after XP upgrade

[Kiem Madvanen]

I upgraded a Win98SE system to XP Home yesterday. The system is an HP
9680C, 650MHz PIII, 128MB memory, 40 GB Maxtor drive (plenty of space
free). The upgrade went fine, system is fully functional, but now I
notice that the hard disk activity light is on continuously, never
shuts off. The system is responsive and working fine, no problems
noted in system hardware. My thought is to simply ignore it - anyone
thing this is a problem?

Zub

 

[Dave Starcher]

I had a similar problem once and it turned out that I had
somehow set a very large folder (6GB)that was located on
another machine on my network to be available offline.
This caused continuous sychronization which made the disk
run continuously and the CPU usage to remain at about
50%. Not sure if this applies to you, but you can check
to see if you have enabled offline folders. Click Start,
My computer, and select the Tools menu. Then select
Folder options. Look under the Offline Files tab and the
first checkbox will tell you if they are enabled or not.
The other settings are only used if offline files is
enabled. Hope this helps.
Dave

 

[Mike]

Try adding more ram your system is a little low for xp
If your running anti-virus/firewall and other programs
your computer could be using your HD as ram
Later

 

[cimex]

And using the HDD for RAM will slow things down tremendously.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I upgraded a Win98SE system to XP Home yesterday. The system is an HP
9680C, 650MHz PIII, 128MB memory, 40 GB Maxtor drive (plenty of space
free). The upgrade went fine, system is fully functional, but now I
notice that the hard disk activity light is on continuously, never
shuts off. The system is responsive and working fine, no problems
noted in system hardware. My thought is to simply ignore it - anyone
thing this is a problem?

You may have the search indexing running whenever possible, to make
indexes of documents for faster search by 'contains text'. Most people
find the resources used a worse waste than the slower search - it is
really something for Office use. Try disabling it - at Control Panel -
Admin tools - Services, double click Indexing service, click Stop, then
select Startup type as Disabled, and Apply.

I would say BTW that buying that machine an extra 128MB of RAM would
improve performance a lot - it will be paging pretty heavily,, and this
will contribute to that HD use, and slow things down