Posted on 08/03/2015 3:18:07 PM PDT by jimt
Why does my cheapo Dell Inspiron netbook have continuous hard disk activity when idle ? Not only during actual usage, but ALL the time - like now ?
I've been an MS OS user since DOS 3.3. But with MS's current massive invasion of privacy (Windows 10) and seeing constant, non-stop disk activity when there's no reason for it, I don't trust Windows 7 either. What gives ?
He may have that turned off.
If it’s cheap it may be underpowered in terms of RAM hence the establishment of and possibly heavy use of the swap file.
Latter-day version of Windows have a search indexer that runs to, er, index files for facilitating searches. Windows 7 has been fairly stable but the ‘Green Bar of Slowness’ when doing file searches remains a major pain. According to MS the index function speeds these searches up.
The promise is that the indexing will only take place when the system is idle but as with all promises from MS I take that with a grain of salt.
Maybe you are in perpetual ‘Indexing’ mode??
The os should be smart enough to suggest that the user turn it on. This sounds very much like disk management I had to do with Win3.1.
All is calm here running Debian 8
What he said here. Turn off indexing. When I used to use Windows it always did that until I turned it off.
One Gb RAM will barely run Win7. Two Gb is the minimum I would recommend. I would let Windows sort out the pagefile memory itself and do not try to force it to use more if the HDD is already slow, or turn it off completely, which would be a serious mistake with only 1 Gb of RAM.
Tune up your HDD first by defragging and check for disk errors, then if you have less than 15% free space you should free up space by dumping some of your data to another storage drive or upgrade the HDD to a larger and faster drive. You should also upgrade the RAM to at least 2Gb if you are getting it serviced, but 4 is even better.
Or maybe it is just time to get another computer with better specs all around. There are some good deals for used computers (see walmart or dell) if you don’t want to buy something new.
How about upgrading to Windows 10?
+ Belarc advisor
1 GB of memory is not enough.
I probably have the same netbook you have. Never could play youtube properly with that Windows 7 Starter edition. Ran Lubuntu on it for a while, which worked OK. Elementary OS runs great. All depends on if you need a program that runs only on Windows.
Use the “Resource Monitor” tool under the Performance Tab of the Windows Task Manager to take a look at what processes are using the HD. Do note though, that even when everything else is idle, this tool itself records stuff to the HD continuously when in use.
Good call; I THINK the technical term is “thrashing”.
I read it that way too (lol).
w7 has msconfig. go to win key, run, msconfig. uncheck all startup items that are not MS. See if the churning stops. If yes add back 5 items reboot. Do this until you find the issue. If the churning isn’t stopped then its a virus or the pagefile. BTW there is a lot of stupidity around W10. Its much better then 7 or 8, Edge is a modern browser, and if your system was built for XP, likely it can run W10.
When you update to 10 be aware if you have a newer(3-4 y/o) computer with UEFI (bios) make sure you do a UEFI bios install. your system will boot and be faster.
Open up the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), click the Performance tab, then click on Resource Monitor, then click on the disk tab.
That will give you some clues.
I had the same problem on my old XP box, and it was AVG anti-virus that was the problem.
Ran disk cleanup and defrag with little result. Turning off indexing (I think) seems to have had a huge and welcome result
Thanks ! If it’s not permanent I’ll be back for more help !
Automatic updates ? NEVER ! It’s the first thing I do on ANY new PC.
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