Vista - Spurious disk activity, disabled the usual suspects.

I have a Dell XPS 1530 with Vista Buisness installed.
The problem I'm having is that every once in a while it seems that the
laptop embarks on a lengthy period of constant disk operation. This
happens approximatly every 2-3 days and lasts about 15 minutes.
I have read practically every bit of information google can find
regarding this.
Here's what I've done so far:
- Disabled indexing, auto-defragment
- Disabled any other service which I don't need according to this
site:
http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm
- Installed Sysinternals autoruns.exe, procmon.exe and Process
Explorer
- Disabled any scheduled tasks I don't need using the Scheduled tasks
snapin
- Using autoruns.exe, Disabled any programs that run on login, went
again over all the scheduled tasks.
- There is no antivirus installed, windows firewall is enabled,
windows defender is enabled but its scheduled task is not.

When the disk activity is happening I'm opening procmon.exe (with
minimal filters) and I don't see anything happening other than the
occasional (once every few seconds) access by explorer.exe.
In Process Explorer I've added the IO Read delta, IO Write delta and
IO Other delta columns. When the disk activity is happening I see no
unusual activity other than the occasional access by explorer.exe,
lsass.exe and csrss.exe. Nothing as intensive as what the drive
activity sounds like.
All of the service processes are silent.
The same test using windows task manager yields the same result.

What could possibly be the cause of this? and why can't I see it
happening in any of the tools I'm using?
Is there some kind of low-level disk monitor that could give me a
definitive answer as to who accesses the disk?

No antivirus installed. I would suspect that the computer has been invaded
and periodically someone else has been using it for their purposes.

Enable everything in Windows defender. Allow it to do the daily checks (only
takes a couple of minutes).

Install a good antivirus program and update it. Then run a comprehensive
scan.

Download a few good anti malware programs. Update them and run comprehensive
scans with them.

You may be surprised at what you find.

--

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


"shoosh" <shooshx@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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