Hard Drive constanly being accessed!

[Shagga]

As the title says really. It's not my PC but a friends. I have checked the standard things like making sure DMA is enabled, Findfast is not in the Startup folder, Index service is not enabled. He has Norton's AV 2004 installed with Auto protect enabled. I have disabled this but it still happens. I have changed IDE cables, disconnected drives, even let windows manage the virtual Memory but still no joy. There is no spyware installed, dialers etc or viruses.

He's running WinXP (Home).....any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Idle-time background defragmentation? XP does that by default, I think.

 

[Shagga]

Where do I look to see if this is enabled?

 

[Jiggz]

Try the Task Scheduler. Start>Progra>Accessories>System Tools>Task Scheduler. If it's not there you can find out from Task Manager on who is using the HDD by looking onthe processes. Invokde the Task manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del.

 

[GrumpyMan]

System restore?

 

[Regs]

Seems like a program or virus is soaking up all the virtual memory on your OS. Nothing hardware releated.

 

[tooltime]

is something banging the cpu? are there any processes in task manager hitting the cpu? start in safe mode?

 

[Shagga]

Try the Task Scheduler. Start>Progra>Accessories>System Tools>Task Scheduler. If it's not there you can find out from Task Manager on who is using the HDD by looking onthe processes. Invokde the Task manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del.

Yeah tried that. There alot of processes running...34 of them I'm just trying to assess what is what! The task scheduler has nothing in it...

System restore?

This is enabled so it might be this...

Seems like a program or virus is soaking up all the virtual memory on your OS. Nothing hardware releated

Not a virus but possibly a program somewhere...(I think it's Norton AV if I'm honest)

is something banging the cpu? are there any processes in task manager hitting the cpu? start in safe mode?

There is a lot happening here I'll close each process and see what happens.

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

[corkyg]

Try going into Control Panel/System, and turning off AUTOMATIC UPDATES.

 

[Jiggz]

If you have 34 processes running that means you must have a lot of programs running in the background. First make sure you shut down all programs running. Again this can be done in the task mgr. Then check the processes. Stop them one at a time and see which one is causing the HDD constant access.

 

[Viper96720]

Drive indexing right click drive letter and see if enabled.