[ckullas]

I have been having major problems with my hard drive being accessed every 3 seconds or so. When playing a comuter game the screen will freeze momentarily while the hard drive is accessed. Even when doing absolutely nothing, this hard drive activity is occuring. I have disabled system restore which has not resolved the problem. Why would the hard drive be accessed even when absolutely nothing is being done? My system is an amd 1.9 with 512RAM. please offer any advice you might have...

CKullas

[MSNwar]

Right click the task bar and select task manager from the drop down menu.
In the task managaer applet you will see a list of applications and processes running.
Determine if any applications are running in the background and shut them down one by one till your resolve the conflict.

Be sure to turn off Norton AntiVirus if that is your viri software.

[Rick]

Yeah...and you may want to pick up a firewall to make sure you are not being hacked. It's not very likely...probably an app running in the background but I would make sure to rule it out.

Rick

[ckullas]

I tried looking in the task manager, none of the processes shut down seems to help. I did notice that the system idle process said 99 under to cpu category. In the original pos I said the hard drive was being accessed every 3 secs, but it actually is a continuous process. Even when not doing anything for 10 minutes, hard drive is still constantly being accesssed. This occurs with firewall up or down. This is crzy, i'm about to throw in the towel and erase the whole kit and kaboodle with the system recovery cds that came with my system. Any other thoughts?

[FthrJACK]

it sounds like some crashed application to me, something in the background. either that or yes, your pc has been trojaned or hacked.

99% load and hard disk going all the time, definatley sounds like a crash! what OS are you using? have you by any chance installed norton system works?

[Drewdatrip]

This sounds very familiar...i recal find out in a previous situation that this was linked to a problem with Office 2000 or Xp..
I recall the unticking of a paricular option within the application that enables documents and or the application to be brought up more quickly....
Not positive, but hopfully this will ring a bell with some others...

=Drew

[HashDump]

ckullas,

Try checking the size of your page file, could be your setting is too low and the OS is continually moving instructions in and out of your memory (thrashing).

You can right click on my computer>properties>advanced tab>performance options>virtual memory>change> this setting should be about (looking to the others for help here) 5% of your hard drive size.

This instructions are for a W2K box...I'm sure XP is somewhat similiar in accessing this option.

good luck

[FthrJACK]

it should be 1.5 times the size of your actual RAM.

128mb RAM = 192MB cache

256mb RAM = 384mb cache

512mb RAM = 768mb cache etc etc.

[ckullas]

I did have norton system works on my computer, but I uninstalled it today hoping that might solve the problem as i've heard it can sometimes cause system instability. Obviously it didn't work. My page file has already been checked and its an appropriate size. Thanks for all the advice so far.

CKullas

[FthrJACK]

i knew u had that cr*p installed

did the problem start after installing this? or is it really recent?
can you tell me your specs? OS. cpu speed, ram etc

[ckullas]

The problem started more recently, seemed it might have ocurred after trying to update my video drivers for my visiontek Ti500 64mg vid card. I can't really be sure, but I have had the Norton crap on there for a long time. My system is an AMD Athlon 1.9 with 512mg RAM. My page file is set around 1250 or so, and I do have the autorestore function off (this cause me a similar problem about 6 months ago). My system was put together by Falcon NW.

[ckullas]

Forgot to mention i'm using win xp

[FthrJACK]

Theres just 3 things that could be causing this, one is a virus such as sircam, bugbear etc. the other is someones broken into your pc (not likley unless your on a 10mbit line or something) and lastly its some bad application causing it, or one thats crashed.

what firewall are you using and what anti virus software?

what OS are you running, windows XP/2000/NT/9x ?

let me guess before you answer, XP / zonealarm / mcaffee

[ckullas]

win xp, was using Norton antivirus, and Norton firewall.

[Doggie]

i suggess removing some background processes.. norton antivirus has background scanning and sometimes takes a heap of memory

[FthrJACK]

norton firewall is a pest on XP. try Kerio
its free, very good, lots of features, you can backup firewall rules and save them to file incase of a format etc.
People will start to think im getting paid for recomending it lol. but its a **** fine program, and free for home use.
i havent had a single problem with it on XP at all.
Norton firewall causes a lot of people problems, but not all. so it might not be the culprit, but theres one sure way to find out!

also: open task manager up (hit CTRL+ALT+DEL)

go to processes, then click on View > select columns

Tick CPU Time, and Page faults, then click on OK.
what process is hogging the CPU most? and what process has the most Page faults?

mine are caused by norton and Microsoft Debug manager.

Attached File(s)

•  taskman.gif (21.4K)
  Number of downloads: 1

[Doggie]

ermm.. mdm is something to do with early versions of messenger 4 to 4.7.. also .. dloading kerio firewall 2.. it looks good.. xp firewall isn't good

[FthrJACK]

its machine debug manager, or microsoft debug manager, same thing people call it either, but the correct name is the first one. dont believe me? use google and search for MDM.exe
Id be really suprised if it was to do with messenger 4.7X as ive never installed it. it was Windows messenger, then i removed that and installed a beta of MSN 5.*
Now obviously using the full release of MSN5.

[Doggie]

well.. loadup msconfig and remove it from startup and del mdm.exe.. don't need it

[LS_Dragons]

Are you on a network? Many hard disk access issues are caused on XP because of a win98 computer sharing a drive on the XP computer. Also - if you have office installed - try turning off the indexing feature. Here is how:
go into Word 2002, bring up the Task Pane, switch to the "Search" Task Pane, and switch off Indexing Services under Search Options

LS_Dragons