Continuous Hard Drive Activity - Vista problem?

Hello All,
The hard drive on my T61 shows non stop hard drive activity for a long long time (about 1 hour and still going on) after Log on. The computer is not connected to the internet and the wireless is off, so I guess it is not downloading or updating anything online. About 90 processes are running. I don't understand why there is continuous hard drive activity even though I am not running any applications. Is it a problem with vista? Will a clean install solve this problem or will it be the same?

 

It's probably indexing your hard drive. Turn off indexing and see if it stops.

 

Not a vista problem, a vista feature. Vista is constantly hitting up your harddrive.

Turn off Windows Search Indexing. Its the first step in this list of top 10 vista tweeks. Follow the rest of the guide to help trim down windows and let me know if your problems are solved.
http://mostlysavingmoney.com/2007/06/top-10-windows-vista-speed-tweaks/

 

Thanks Braddd, that link seems helpful. I will do a clean install soon (waiting for the WAU disk from compusa) and will do the tweaks. But it seems odd that MS would incorporate all these auto-functions without giving a thought to overall system performance. Seems like with all these functions in vista, it would need 4GB of RAM to run smoothly.

 

SuperFetch causes a lot of disk activity. I turn off the following services and it reduces the disk I/O to near zero:

Windows Search
SuperFetch
Offline Files

I don't need any of those. Search is nice, so of the three, that's the one I would turn back on. After the initial index creation, disk I/O is pretty low for it.

 

Use http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processmonitor.mspx to figure out what is doing the disk i/o. You must also wanna go to Filter > Filter and disable filters for System, IRP_MJ_, FASTIO_.

Besides the stuff mentioned above, the Diskeeper that Lenovo ships with might be defragmenting while you're working. You can either disable it or change its schedule.

 

Thank you for solving this for me, too. How do I turn off offline files, though?

 

vista comes with a handy feature that lets u monitor all aspects of the system... Reliability and Performance Monitor

in the HDD section it wil show u where all the activity is (what process name) then just google the process and determine if its good/bad/useful ect...

i spent quiet a bit time in this app when i first got vista, was helpful to bring the system up to a fast level!

Cheers

 

1) turn off system restore
2) disable readyboost service
3) disable superfetch service
4) disable indexing
5) uninstall diskkeeper

i get very little activity now, had the same problem