Does windows XP have auto defrag?

[alarmer]

Hello there i have been having weird situation with Win XP for long time and nobody has been able to tell me what causes this.

What ever I do with my cpu or leave it alone for 2 hours example my hard drive led allways blinks and I can hear constant crunching sound from hard drive.

This is really annoying since last installs of windows 98/me never did this one, they loaded up and thats it. With windows XP , i can leave it alone for hours and still it blinks the HD led. Iam using FAT32 in all partitions and i have disabled hardware monitoring. Stopping services wont help a thing and basicly iam totally lost with this one, is this normal does everybody else have this one too?

Please put your eye close to the hd led and see if it blinks even if you dont have any progs running etc

I have tryed win xp with 2 different motherboards and with 2 different hard drives same result, blink blink crunch crunch ..

my specs :
1400tb
epox 8kha+
512 ddr pc2100
elsa gf3 ti200
fortissimo 2
Ibm 120gxp 40gig hd

ps. I have tryed some tweaks like cacheman and setting some paging tweaks tot the registery but no help .

 

[Mitzi]

WinXP doesn't have an Auto defrag.

Your best way to see whats going on is press CTRL-ALT-DEL and have a look at the process list and see whats eating processing time when the hard drive is grinding, that should give you some idea what process/application is causing the HDD activity.

Edit : Spelling.

 

[FuManStan]

There are a lot of things that could be running in the background.... System Restore, Hibernation, Automatic Updates... could be any of those

 

[n0cmonkey]

Do a search in the forum for this one. Its been answered a few times I believe. The answer has to do with caching I think. It basically caches, or indexes, or something, the files on the hard drive to make searching faster. There are ways to disable it and a search should help you find them.

 

[jaybittle]

Well, IIRC, XP does have a service similar to Speed Disk that it does in idle times.. It moves files on your hard drive, to better optimize their position..

Does it defrag the entire drive -- no, but it tries to make disk access more efficient with caching and the like..

I'm not sure if there is a way to disable it, however.. and as n0cmonkey said, it may also be the Find Service running, indexing files..

cheers,
--jb

 

[NetGuySC]

 

[Bucksnort]

That is the indexing service in xp. Its normal and you can disable it if you want in administrative tools, indexing service. To learn more about it go to help & support and type in indexing service.

 

[alarmer]

Hello there thanks for your answers..

I have located the Indexing service and disabled it in the services.msc

But the problem remains . Blink .. Blink .. blink ..

In prosseses bar idale has 99% of prosessing power and explorer and taskmanager takes 1% once in a while ..

Ill try to search the forums but if anybody has a answer please write it here

Some cache tips would be welcome

 

[n0cmonkey]

Is it really that bad? The blinky light keep your fishies awake?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

<< Hello there thanks for your answers..

I have located the Indexing service and disabled it in the services.msc

But the problem remains . Blink .. Blink .. blink ..

In prosseses bar idale has 99% of prosessing power and explorer and taskmanager takes 1% once in a while ..

Ill try to search the forums but if anybody has a answer please write it here

Some cache tips would be welcome >>


I wouldnt worry about it man, if indexing is turned off, then i dont think anything else 'bad' is going on, i dont have xp, but its not really an odd thing for your hard drive to be accessed without you explicitly telling it to do so.

and just in case your fishies are being disturbed, you could set it to power down the hard drive after being idle for XX minutes.

 

[mrbass]

you probably have spyware installed. get rid of it lavasoftusa.com dl and install ad-aware.

 

[bsobel]

> you probably have spyware installed.

Actually it's most likely the program load optimization running. But, it never hurts to check.
Bill