XP Home - How often does your harddisk activity light flash?

[bgc99]

I've got my newly built system temp. on the table top and the activity light is at eye level and I notice that it is always flashing, even when I'm not doing anything. I guess my old computer did it too and I just didn't notice because it was on the floor.

The light is not constantly on or anything, just brief flashes every few seconds.

Thanks,
BGC

 

[Bassyhead]

The operating system may be writing event logs, swapping the page file, etc. That's normal. My windows machine light flashes every 3-5 seconds or so.

 

[Maximilian]

Yea same.

 

[Cdeck]

mine doesn't do that. ms must have shares in hard disk companies. whatever is doing it then kill it. it's most likely the locater service which is a lame duck anyway.

 

[Jeff7]

Same here. Flashes at least every 5 seconds - but that's MBM5 writing a log to the drive, which is my doing. On other systems though it seems to do the same.

Go to Task Manager, View -> Select Columns, and check off I/O Write/Read/Other Bytes, and you can then watch which specific processes are doing what. Not that it'll really do anything, but it may be interesting anyway. 🙂
Svchost.exe, lsass.exe, csrss.exe - basic processes which generate a bit of hard drive on a regular basis.

 

[ManyBeers]

Maybe It is the Indexing Service running. You can disable it through Services.msc or remove it via Add Remove Programs...Windows Components.