Vista - Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id

Use the Performance and Reliability Monitor in Adminstrative Tools to get an
idea of what is going on with the drive activity. This gave me useful info
and a suggested course to take in a similar situation. I found out that the
system was spending excessive time writing to the page file and followed the
suggestion in the report.

"4evrnyt" <4evrnyt.399r7c@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4evrnyt.399r7c@xxxxxx

I've seen McAffee do this on my computer from time to time. Regardless
though, you can find out by using something to see what's using resources. A
good example: At Sysinternals.com you can get Process Explorer. It's a
great little utility to see what's going on. Try it, let us know...
--
-me.
Let this forum know if this helps or if you figure out the problem, so
others can benefit.



"Colin Barnhorst" wrote:

I upgraded my Acer Aspire from 1Gig to 2 Gig when I purchased it and have
not had any low memory issues that I can detect. I guess it depends what
software you run and how memory intensive the software is. But it is amazing
how much memory you need considering my first 386 computer only had 1MB and
I thought upgrading to 2MB was cutting edge!

James
"Colin Barnhorst" <c.barnhorst@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:54FD373C-8992-4377-B62C-885578F52EC8@xxxxxx

Close all applications. Run Perfmon. Click on Disk. Click on disk
Write. If your system sits "idle" long enough you should eventually
see disk write drop off to nothing. If not, look to see what is causing
disk IO. Turning off Superfetch and indexing on your fixed disk
drive(s) kills lots of disk IO without effecting system performance.

The "hard drive light" can indicate more than just fixed disk activity.
If your case IO light keeps blinking about once a second after disk
write activity stops then there is no disk activity - the problem may be
the SATA/IDE chipset IO polling related to your CD/DVD drive. If this
is the case disconnect the SATA or IDE connection to your CD/DVD drive.
Does this reduce of eliminate "apparent" IO activity?

What is your motherboard brand/model and the SATA/IDE chipset(s) on the
motherboard?


4evrnyt wrote:

RB, you seem to have given the best advice here, sir. I am having the
same issue as described above--the drive light blinks about every second
when nothing is apparently going on and no apps are visibly running
(other than whatever background apps are running). This is occurring on
a brand-new, virus-free Toshiba laptop with a P7350 Duo 2 processor with
4 GB of DDR3 RAM and Vista 64. Perfmon shows the activity and also
shows a constant processor util of about 4%-7%. The used resources
(memory) stat is about 30% (so, apparently, Vista is a major resource
hog, I guess). The only thing that appears to be accessing the drive is
the operating system, but I may be missing something because it's hard
to look at all that in a glance and I haven't searched out every line to
see exactly what it is. What say you for my situation?

P.S. I have also noticed that the mouse (touchpad) pointer appears to
skip a beat every now and then and/or appear to freeze momentarily. I
just plugged in an external mouse to see if it does the same with the
mouse (to determine if the problem is with the touchpad or my
comfortability with it rather than a system performance problem).


Thanks in advance,
Logos Child


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If it is a brand new Vista system then it will take it about a week to
complete indexing the driver for rapid retrieval of data by Vista. The
indexing process only runs when other applications are not running which is
exactly the symptom you are reporting.
"Logoschild" <Logoschild.3g0cjc@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Logoschild.3g0cjc@xxxxxx

Lots of stuff run in the background with Vista. It is not likely you will
ever get to a point that the disk light does not flash occasionally. It
indexes the drives, defrags the drives, relocates most used stuff to the
fastest part of the drive, it builds lists of most used apps, it checks for
updates, it phones home for validation, ..... The list is much longer. The
point is that it is NOT XP, and don't expect to make it act like XP.
Flashing drive lights are what Vista does.

Good luck.


"Logoschild" <Logoschild.3g0cjc@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Logoschild.3g0cjc@xxxxxx

It is the CD or DVD ROM.

Try going to the Safely Remove hardware (even though it may not be a
usb) and do Stop on the CD or DVD listed.

If you don't see it there and want to verify that this is indeed it,
just disconnect the ribbon cable, reboot. You'll notice the blinking is
gone.

I don't know exactly why--I think on some OS's and some DVD/CD units,
the os constantly checks it--it might be as the DVD unit gets
older--i've had this happen twice--always after about a year from when I
got the dvd unit.
--Jim


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