What could cause constant disk access in Vista?

[Guest]

I booted up this Vista Home Premium machine maybe 10 minutes ago.
Right now I am not running anything, and the hard disk has been
accessing like crazy since I started up the computer. What could
cause that? Oh wait, now it has finally stopped.

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

I booted up this Vista Home Premium machine maybe 10 minutes ago.
Right now I am not running anything, and the hard disk has been
accessing like crazy since I started up the computer. What could
cause that? Oh wait, now it has finally stopped.

File indexing, Trojans, the defrag process, virus checker running a full
scan..


--
Mike Hall - MVP
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[Marc]

File indexing, Trojans, the defrag process, virus checker running a full
scan..

A few settings I'd change to stop this.

Change the defrag schedule to once a month (once a week is too often, you
could argue once a month is too). Go Start > Search type "defrag" and open
Disk Defragmenter to do this.

Open the power options, click "change plan settings" then advanced, and then
look down the list for the Index settings. Set the minimal indexing ("Power
Saver"). This may mean your index is out of date, sometimes deleted files
might appear in search results. No big deal for me.

Open Windows Defender click tools > options and change the daily scan to a
weekly one. Once a day is too often for most people.

Open your antivirus program and turn off any daily scans. I do a full scan
once a month. If your virus checker scans in real time (most do) then you
shouldn't need to go back and scan everything again ever day.

Use the "Sleep" option instead of shutdown. Or if it's a laptop then use
Hibernate.

Unless you install new programs on a daily basis, or generate large video
files regularly then the default settings are just slowing you down for no
reason.

Marc

 

[Guest]

A few settings I'd change to stop this.

Change the defrag schedule to once a month (once a week is too often, you
could argue once a month is too). Go Start > Search type "defrag" and open
Disk Defragmenter to do this.

Last run was 7/9, and next run is 7/16, so today's heavy disk access
was not the Disk Defragmenter.

Open the power options, click "change plan settings" then advanced, and then
look down the list for the Index settings. Set the minimal indexing ("Power
Saver"). This may mean your index is out of date, sometimes deleted files
might appear in search results. No big deal for me.

Open Windows Defender click tools > options and change the daily scan to a
weekly one. Once a day is too often for most people.

Last scan was on 7/12 and it is scheduled to run daily at 2 AM, so
that also would not explain today's heavy disk access.

Open your antivirus program and turn off any daily scans. I do a full scan
once a month. If your virus checker scans in real time (most do) then you
shouldn't need to go back and scan everything again ever day.

I run AntiVir and already had the daily scan disabled, so that too
does not explain it.

Use the "Sleep" option instead of shutdown. Or if it's a laptop then use
Hibernate.

May I ask how that would affect heavy disk accessing?

Unless you install new programs on a daily basis, or generate large video
files regularly then the default settings are just slowing you down for no
reason.

So today's heavy disk access may have just been indexing? I guess it
finished all the indexing after 10 minutes, because the hard disk has
been pretty quiet since then.

Thank you for all your recommendations.

 

[Dauphin de Viennois]

I booted up this Vista Home Premium machine maybe 10 minutes ago.
Right now I am not running anything, and the hard disk has been
accessing like crazy since I started up the computer. What could
cause that? Oh wait, now it has finally stopped.

Superfetch. Vista is a self tuning OS and it will quiet down after a few
weeks of self tuning. How much ram do you have? I found that going from 2GB
of ram to 4GB on Vista64 really helped with the amount of disk thrashing.

 

[Marc]

May I ask how that would affect heavy disk accessing?

When you turn on your PC - many applications and services have to initialize
their state from scratch. When you sleep or hibernate, the state of your
whole PC is never lost, and so you won't have to reload services and other
startup programs.

I can only suggest you run Windows Defender, and use the Software Explorer
(under Tools) to see what other programs are running on startup. Disable
anything you don't use often (leave device relation items like printer
utilities though)

HTH

Marc