What makes a hard disk access every second?

[juhani.jaakola]

I have Windows XP Home SP2 on Acer Aspire 9300 laptop. The hard disk
LED blinks every second - how can I find out what program accesses the
hard disk so often? I guess such accesses use up my laptop battery when
I'm on battery power.

I have checked Task Manager, but best I can do there is sort all
processes by their CPU usage. I think the top CPU users do not cause
these accesses. How can I sort processes by their hard disk access
frequency?

Is there a good source of information on tuning Windows XP for laptops?

 

[FreeComputerConsultant.com]

You can try taking a look here:

http://www.freecomputerconsultant.com/TipOfTheWeek-20061124-Tip-Of-The-Week.html

addresses a utility to see what's going on.

 

[John Wunderlich]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in

I have Windows XP Home SP2 on Acer Aspire 9300 laptop. The hard
disk LED blinks every second - how can I find out what program
accesses the hard disk so often? I guess such accesses use up my
laptop battery when I'm on battery power.

I have checked Task Manager, but best I can do there is sort all
processes by their CPU usage. I think the top CPU users do not
cause these accesses. How can I sort processes by their hard disk
access frequency?

Is there a good source of information on tuning Windows XP for
laptops?

The free tool "Diskmon" will show you all disk activity.

<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Diskmon.mspx>

More than likely there is always a constant stream of small writes
to disk that are cached it memory until an opportune time when the
whole cache is written to disk (once a second?)

HTH,
John