HD running in background - worries me

[smithsonga]

Ok, my WinXP system is running slower than normal and I hear a ton of harddrive activity all the time.

I ran HJC and parsed it...nothing out of the ordinary and I recognized everything. I look at task manager and my CPU usage isnt high but the standard system idle process is taking 95%+ of it.

I ran adware, spybot, ewido...just cookies found.

Thoughts? Also, what is the best free tool to optimize or help me free up the resources on this system? All my systems start out fast and slowly get congested. Or procedure as I am medium computer savvy and could run through them.

thx

[cauzomb]

Look up: How to configure drive indexing service and something else called write behind cache; you want the settings that will prevent extra hard-disk activity.

[smithsonga]

any reason to not completely disable the indexing service?

also, when I go to disable write behind cache in device manager, the choices are grayed out?

[starshooter10]

how much ram do you have?

alot of people with under 512 MB find that the swap file is used alot

if you are more of a power user you should aim for 1GB of ram...

and ram is cheap!

[cauzomb]

You can disable drive indexing. Some controllers don't support write behind cache.

[jholland1964]

Maybe I have been reading Task Manager wrong all these years...
I thought this meant System Idle is NOT using resources - it is showing what is left over...in your case 95%+. The idle process takes place when the processor isn't being sent any other work to do.
I always thought that System Idle should be a high number - I do not know how better to explain it - it is totally normal for system idle to be high so system idle at 99% says the system is 99% idle.
Right now mine says System Idle 98 and is using 16K of memory. I just checked mail with Mailwasher and System Idle went down during this time to 94, once mail checking was complete it went back up to 99.
Computer is speeding along as normal.

Ignoring system idle, what else is using the cpu on the machine? Hard drive activity can mean something entirely different than processor activity.

[smithsonga]

fair enough. dont know if the task manager has to show 100% usage all the time. Maybe it is 100% of the cpu that is being used at that time.

e.g. 95% of the 4% being used.

Anyway, is there any software that will show what is accessing the hard drive at any given time?

[cauzomb]

look for disk access monitoring applications here

[cauzomb]

I moved this to "opperating systems"

[jholland1964]

After reading through all this again you really have not given us much info....

I ran HJC and parsed it...nothing out of the ordinary and I recognized everything... I ran adware, spybot, ewido...just cookies found.

How are you connected to the internet? Does this happen whether you are online or not? What firewall do you use? What anti-virus program do you use? What other security programs are running all the time?

I for one, would like to see a brand new HJT log...not the one you said you parsed, which by the way, if you used the analyzer here isn't worth anything. It has not been updated since our crash a year ago and analyzing your own HJT log is not recommended anyway.