what the heck is vista doing?

Overall, I'm happy with Vista, but there is this one thing that's anoying the heck out of me.

I'm trying to do my homeowrk, and I need peace and quiet, but if I leave the computer idle for five minutes, I hear the hard drive reading/writing like crazy, not only that, it wakes up my external hard drive which makes even more noise.

What in the world is Vista doing?

Here is a screenshot of the hard drive activity:

The image name is not visible, but it's 'System'

 

Not entirely sure, but I believe Vista has an "auto-defragment" option so that when there isn't any PC activity it'll automatically defragment the hard drive.

 

it defrag's the hard drive, and possibly defragging the boot files

 

it indexes files, it defrags, it does a handfull of things. Its trying to be as efficant as possible and do things when your not using the computer.

 

vista itself does a few things in the background with the harddisk - defrag, malware scan (with windows defender), indexing (for faster desktop search).

 

There's also SuperFetch, which attempts to anticipate future program accesses and caches them into memory beforehand. I turned this one off just so my battery doesn't go down as fast.

 

Superfetch ONLY occurs at startup. This symptom is most likely the defrag or possibly indexing, both of which over time will be require less time and become less noticeable.

There is a thread elsewhere, about the tweak where folks are getting all sorts of improvements in boot time by using an OLD XP application that fakes the Vista OS into thinking the system is idle, thus allowing it to do the boot file defrag that Vista WANTS to do when the system is idle. The big problem is most folks don't let the machine ever truly go idle. They fire it up, do some work and shut it down. Therefore the boot file defrag never runs. Then they run this "tweak" and are amazed at how much faster it boots and proclaim this tweak has performed a minor miracle and contact the pope to suggest beatification. When in reality as the original poster has found out, if they leave their machine sit running at idle occasionally, Vista will perform these "miracles" all by itself.

Gary

 

System Restore working,
at least that's what the "C:\System Volume Information" is

 

It's indexing and/or defrag, as already stated.

There's no reason to turn off PreFetch or SuperFetch, and a lot of good reasons to leave it running.

There may well be good reasons to change what or how much Vista tries to keep indexed. I certainly did.

Defrag is also a good thing. Let it be.

 

No, system restore only writes to the drive when you are changing a file. In the case of program or OS files, when you are installing or uninstalling something. It does nothing at all at idle.

Gary

 

It does go down overtime, but the entire process of making the system run efficiently is truly inefficient.

My desktop after about 2 months finally settled down. I haven't had Vista on my laptop for more than 30 consecutive days since I got in July, so I still have to listen to the HD's constant churning.

 

I think it's worth it. My laptop is blazing fast with Vista on it. I usually leave it idle when I go to a class that doesn't require my notebook. So, those processes can run all they want; especially if it will make my system more efficient.

 

Heck, I don't care what good is doing, I don't like it. I think I'll leave the laptop on for a full day sitting idle, see if it finally settles down like some people said.

Thanks for all the answers.

 

I find myself frequently asking "what the heck is vista doing?". I have indexing, auto defrag, and auto malware scan turned off, yet Vista will sometimes write data to the hard drive for long periods of time. When I investigate, the file Vista is writing to is some random volume information file or hidden log file - what the heck is vista doing?
Today, I plugged in a flash usb drive, and Vista decided to spend 5 min doing something before I could access the data (and no, it was not a virus scan).

 

See this thread.

 

Looking for terrorists files?
Or, even worse, pirated mp3s?
Perhaps it's trying to find pictures of Bill Gate's wife. Maybe Bill is that jealous.

Who knows? It is illegal trying to find that out by reverse engineering it.

I experienced the same disk activity with shadowcopy turned off, no indexing, no antivirus, defender disabled (the process, not only the program), no page file, no hibernation file (well that might not be responsible for disk activity), no nonMS programs launched at boot, serviced stripped to a minimum, updata disabled and I do not know what else disabled.

Perhaps it's superfetch. I've been tampering with partitions lately and it's starting to understand what's going on.

 

It's not illegal to try to find out, hell Microsoft even provides the tools to find out EXACTLY what the disk activity is all about. If you really want to know what it is doing, do a Google search for "sysinternals diskmon". There is also filemon and regmon. Very enlightening tools.

Gary

 

As far as I know if scheduled disk defragmentation is enabled it only runs at a specfic time and not when the computer is idle. At that specific time if you shut down your system, the defragmenter never completes the defragmentation fully. That's how I found that my new notebook was fragmented after I ran a manual check. Now I run the defrag utility manually as and when needed.

 

Is there a way to stop Vista from finding these files? I don't want Bill Gates and his goons knocking at my door.

 

The boot file defrag does run when the system is idle. It is not scheduled at a particular time. Vista is designed to do defrags whenever it finds some idle time so that you don't have to do time scheduled ones.

Gary

 

Consider that goons may be better than nothing.

 

Vista is non-toxic.

 

It is illegal to reverse engineer the code.
With the tools you say, it is possible to know what program/service is accessing the disk. But not why.
In theory (and I stress: in theory) it is possible that an innocent service linked to, say, superfetch, is scanning your disk for the pictures of Bill's wife. And that a service linked to, say, MS update, sends out an encrypted message to a MS server saying "the owner with licence number soso has pictures of Bill's wife on his disk".
All you know is that Windows is using the disk for optimizing performance, and is sending data to MS servers to validate your copy of the software (or to update it so that you can have a "better internet experience").

Thanks, I will check them out.

 

Please note that should have been: "sysinternals disk mon"

Gary