Reducing disk activity in winXP

[Bozz]

Are there any ways to help save battery power in the laptop by reducing the frequency windows needs to write or read from the disk?

Basically have msn open and firefox

 

[Bozz]

OK, I've figured out the two biggest culprits writing to the disk with filemon from sysinternals

Every minute or so, these two operations execute:

c:\windows\internet logs\tvDebug.log

this file is zonealarm related. How do I kill zonealarm logging to this file? I've tried disabling all updates and logging but its still doing it.

Next I get c:\windows\system32\wbem\repository\FS\<various files>

I have NFI what it is and how to stop it repeatedly accessing the disk. Help?

 

[keeleysam]

More RAM

 

[Bozz]

How will more RAM stop the above files from being written to disk?

BTW it already has 1Gb (2x512Mb) and only 200-300Mb is typically used.

Any help on the specific topics please?

 

[bigpow]

More RAM WON'T stop HDD activity

Turn off any background processes like Windows Update, Restore, etc.
The only downside is you have to remember to update your windows, antivirus, etc manually.

I also turned off "Optimize Harddrive when idle" with TweakUI and that helped a bit

Even with Swapfile off, I'm still seeing some intermittent HDD activity - I guess it's WinXP's nature

 

[Bozz]

Thanks for the idea of tweakUI. I'll download that and see what it can do.

Windows Update, AV, Sysrestore etc are NOT affecting the disk, it only spins up when a new file needs loading that isn't cached in RAM or it needs to write to the HD.

The two offenders are listed in my second post at the top of the page. If I could get these two to stop writing to disk, the problem would be solved. Any help on the specifics of the two files above?