How to find out which program accesses when my hard disc?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cindy Parker
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Cindy Parker

Since yesterday I observed a weired behaviour of my notebook:
The hard disc action LED indicator flickers constantly on a very low level.
I mean the LED indicator is not shining permanently and brightly but is very little
oscillating. It seems to me that an unkown program is accessing the hard disc frequently but not heavily.

How can I find out which program this is in detail?

Cindy
 
RightClick in an open area next to the time on the lower right corner. Click
"Task Manager". Look in Applications and Processes to see what is going on
in your computer.

Frank
 
In
Cindy Parker said:
Since yesterday I observed a weired behaviour of my notebook:
The hard disc action LED indicator flickers constantly on a very
low level.
I mean the LED indicator is not shining permanently and brightly
but is very little oscillating. It seems to me that an unkown program
is accessing the hard disc frequently but not heavily.

How can I find out which program this is in detail?
Click to expand...

Start -> Search -> Change Preferences -> With Indexing Service

If "Yes, enable Indexing Service" is checked, then that is the reason for
the disk access. You may or may not wish to uncheck it, but at any rate see
"Learn more about Indexing Service" in that lower panel.

We've never found the Indexing Service to be of any use, as a search still
prgressively scans the disk(s) rather than using any lookup table or
database structure as expected. We also found that near-constant low-level
disk activity to be annoying and I/O consumptive.
 
Since yesterday I observed a weired behaviour of my notebook:
The hard disc action LED indicator flickers constantly on a very low level.
I mean the LED indicator is not shining permanently and brightly but is very little
oscillating. It seems to me that an unkown program is accessing the hard disc frequently but not heavily.

How can I find out which program this is in detail?

Cindy
Click to expand...

One of the easiest things to look for disk activity is to go to TaskMan,
and enable "kernel usage" tracking. That way you'll see not just a graph
of how much processor usage is going on, but you'll see a secondary
redline showing how much of that activity is going on in the kernel. If
there is a lot of kernel activity, then that's likely due to disk activity.

Yousuf Khan
 
Since yesterday I observed a weired behaviour of my notebook:
The hard disc action LED indicator flickers constantly on a very low level.
I mean the LED indicator is not shining permanently and brightly but is very little
oscillating. It seems to me that an unkown program is accessing the hard disc frequently but not heavily.

How can I find out which program this is in detail?

Cindy
Click to expand...

Do you think you had an effect on my computer?

I haven't had this for months, but I used to see the harddrive light
going on frequently for no reason I could think of.

And since then I've been looking for a program like I think you want.
I found one I thought was good just in the last week, but even though
it was called DU.exe, disk usage, and even though it gave info about
every disk read or write, it only gave a little and, alas, not the
program that was doing it. (It can also be run with a parameter that
will put it in the systray, and display a green light for reads and a
red light for writes, but that got old soon.)

Tonight my harddrive light was on with a little blinking constantly
for a while. AVG found a virus in my email for the first time, and my
ex-gfCntl-alt-delete showed no processes I didn't know aobut, with the
possible exception of plugin-container.exe, but that iiuc is normal
and wasn't running earlier anyhow.


Could some of the harddrive activity be caused because I'm down to 2%
free space in one partition?


Cindy, I just noticed that you have again set a follow-up. Did you
see my comments about that in my reply to another post of yours? Do
you see the reasons for my concern?

Could you remove your follow-up request for the rest of this thread,
so that I can read the other posts by you and others. Why should
anyone in the XP.general ng reply to your posts if they will never see
the replies to their replies, or the other replies, including the ones
that solve the problem. I feel you are taking advantage of us,
milking us for information but giving nothing back.


I had a little more to say about the Subject, but I'm not sure if my
post will generate any feedback to me, so I'll save it, hopefully, for
later.
 
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