I keep getting extremely prolonged periods of hard drive activity and its becoming very annoying. I have looked in task manager and I cannot see anything there and its still running fine and there is no extra cpu or memory burden either. Also the drive is fairly new and and I cannot find any errors on it. Anybody got any ideas as to what this might be or if there is a programme to show me what the activity is.

swap file maybe?

Could be Windows indexing service. Not sure about Vista but in XP go Start -> Run and type in services.msc
In the list find indexing service, highlight it and press stop service (it won't do any harm). If your drive activity stops then it's that and nothing to worry about.

Aye, turning indexing off on all drives is just best anyways :)

Also have a look in the System Logs in the Administrative Tools.

As has been suggested, the Indexing system is a culprit for this, as is teh swap file - especially if you're running low on available memory.

Alternatively, how fragmented is your hard disk? That will often cause thrashing of the disk.

Could be your Antivirus software scanning 'behind the scene' as it were, but it would show up in your task manager.

Depends on which bit of Task Manager you are looking in... Open it, click the Processes tab, then click the CPU column-head twice (two clicks rather than a double-click, if you see what I mean) to sort the busiest processes to the top.

Could be one or a lot of spies writing on your HD and using lots of the memory.

You could try Spybot Search and Destroy.

This will tell you what's going on....

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646.aspx

This will tell you what's going on....

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646.aspx

I am running Vista Ultimate Greybeard, would it still run ?
I am going to double the RAM to see if that helps and also check to see if Windows Defender is running when the activity starts. Not sure if Defender would show up in task manager.
Thanks for the help chaps

I am running Vista Ultimate Greybeard, would it still run ?


It doesn't say so on the download page :)