I have been experimenting after i found out that my Windows XP computer kept on writing to the harddrive endlessly. Even during idle time when no programs at all were runing.


I got curious and installed windows XP clean on my laptop (different hardware i thought would maybe help). But even here i can hear the harddrive writing and reading the whole time. Not much but atleast one blink every 1-2secs.

Now i suspected the behaviour is probably normal but it should be stopped! Because this actually slows down the sytem under all situations. It's like having a defrag in the background ALL THE TIME. So i started to researched about the system processes but to no help. I disabled as much as one with an internet connected computer could possibly do. But to no help at all!

The processes that kept on writing all the time can be viewed from within The taskmanager (ctrl-shift+esc) and you simply click on processes, click on view tab and click Select Columns and check I/O Read bytes, I/O Write bytes.

The following in atleast my two experiences were Lsass.exe and svchost.exe. Both are as i understand system services.
To view specificly which one of these services that's writing to the harddrive you can type tasklist /svc

But it doesn't make me much brighter either !!

Can this irritating behaviour of WinXP be stopped or do you have to go back to Windows 2000 to have C: resting when the sytem is idle?

is the indexing service running?

No the indexservice has been disabled. As well as all the rest of the services.

AlecStaar,

Yes, i have a windows 2000 computer here too, and it does none of the constant I/O reading/writing.

It is simple idle if you dont use it. And that i believe gives you really 100% of the available CPU when you need it, hence i think Windows 2000 ought to be faster than XP.

I even did (to be sure) clean installs of Windows 2000 AND Windows XP today! Same results again. Windows 2000 no activity at all and Windows XP - whatever i do it keeps on behaving like this. Isn't it odd, that windows XP needs to load and write from the harddrive all the time?
If you're using Windows XP yourself put your head next to your computer and just sit there idle for a few second and listen. You will hear the harddrives writing even if you have nothing runing at all.

I have tried to localize exactly what it's doing. I even probed the Nic to see if it was sending out commands to M$ homebase or something but, guess what? It wasn't! lol..

I tried to disable all the services that i could under XP but i still cant get it to stop writing to the harddrive. Why do you need a power manager for XP when you only have one harddrive? It wont ever be able to go down anyways! It always loads!

:x