WinXP Task Manager Question

[nablio]

This is probably a dumb question but every time I look in my task manager there is a process called "System Idle Process" that is typically showing between 90 and 99 on the CPU usage. In addition, something always seems to be accessing my hard drive even when there are no programs running. I checked for other processes that could be running in the background that could cause this but I am pretty sure I have killed every process that is not critical. Could it be the "System Idle Process" that is causing this?

 

[prosaic]

System Idle Process is not causing the disk access. And it is okay. It's what your CPU does when it isn't doing anything else.

The OS does a lot of stuff in the background. Indexing is not turned on by default, but the search companion allows the unwary to turn it on by answering a question with what seems to be an appropriate response -- as in something along the lines of "Do you want Windows to turn on Indexing so that searches can be performed faster?" If you answer yes, then Indexing gets switched on. Indexing has a bad name, but it really doesn't affect most systems that adversely.

But it's more likely that the disk accessing you're seeing is the journaling system and the Windows XP prefetch / disk optimization routines at work. The OS is set by default to try to continuously improve boot times and application startup times by moving copies of frequently used code into prefetch areas so that the system comes up ready for action, so to speak. And journaling is the way NTFS keeps track of all file system transactions so that you don't lose data in case of a crash or power loss to the drive. If you're using FAT32 for the drive, then journaling isn't happening.

- prosaic