Constant hard drive activity?

I recently purchased a Studio 15 machine and I am very happy with it, however disk activity is constantly going on with the little hard drive light constantly flashing on and off. Is this normal? This has been happening for many many days now. My virus scanner is not operating and indexing has apparently been completed. According to the resource monitor small bits of data (around 100kb/sec) are constantly being written to system files such as C:\$LogFile (NTFS Volume log). Is this a problem with my computer or is this common for Vista laptops?

 

Its vista updating its Search indexs, so that you can search for files on your pc quicker.

and extremely high hdd usage just after pc boots is vista building a cache of files into the ram

Hope this helps.

 

Also sometimes that could be an antivirus or windows defender sweep running in the background. If you bring up the task manager, you can add additional data views to it. I have mine setup to show my system writes and reads. That will also give you an idea of what programs are keeping your computer busy.

 

If you leave the computer on for a while (over night is good) it should be able to index everything and settle down the search indexing. Keep in mind, the more files you have the longer it will take - but will make things faster later.

 

or it is superfetch. that is the reason why my harddisc keeps on running for over 5 minutes after booting. This feature, with no customize options like systemrestore and defrag (sometimes i really cant believe the ignorance of microsoft), fills the RAM in an awesome speed of 1-5 mb/s to about 75% (quite funny with 4 GB RAM). It really speeds up working with vista quite alot (!!). But this constant hhd noise is quite annoying aswell.

turn off windows defender, index, system restore, superfetch, to check which of them is the problem in your case.

edit: if you have got a hitachi hdd.. my deepest condolences.

 

I know the feeling - it can be so annoying sometimes.
You can rest assured its nothing bad though (I would say!)

 

I too hate it when my hd is constantly in use... but woe it is the way of vista. Not only is it constantly updating the file index for faster file searches, but superfetch is trying to fill any unused memory with a program it estimates you may load next all the time.