Turn WMI Off To Silence Hard Disk?

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Can I turn WMI off to avoid Windows accessing the hard disk?

These Windows Registry settings don't seem to help:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WBEM\CIMOM\EnableEvents = 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WBEM\CIMOM\Logging = 0

Windows seems to access these files even when I'm not doing anything
with my computer:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\OBJECTS.DATA
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\MAPPING2.MAP
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\INDEX.BTR
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\INDEX.MAP
C:\WINDOWS\system32\WBEM\Logs\
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\wbemprox.dll

I'm asking this because I like to write in silence with a word
processor with my laptop (OpenOffice.org 2.0.1, Windows XP Home Edition
SP2, AMD Turion 64 Mobile 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive) so I'm
trying to make my new laptop to avoid accessing the hard disk (unless
of course I press Ctrl+S to save my work once in a while) by
customizing the settings in Windows. Still the hard disk is accessed
about once in a minute, which can interrupt my thoughts when I'm in the
middle of writing a sentence. I have tried turning off most of my
programs (even virus scanner) to find out which programs are accessing
my hard drive by looking at the I/O columns in Windows Task Manager and
processes in Filemon, but it seems like it's none of the programs or
virtual memory (I tried turning it off, which had no effect, so the
problem is not probably with that, also indexing service is turned
off), so it might be a Windows audit or logging script that is
accessing my hard drive once in a while, for example related to WMI.
 
Check out the tools at http://www.sysinternals.com/ for a utility that
monitors and logs all file access. That will show you what's going on.

Are you running Microsoft's Anti-Spyware (Defender) utility? If so, try
disabling it and see if you see a noticeable difference. The reason:
it's been written that it does constant lookups on the Registry--looking
for changes, even when no changes are being written--just checking (to
the point of hurting performance). Hmmmm.... For that reason, many of us
are staying far away from that utility.

And what about your preferences in OpenOffice? You sure you don't have
autosave turned on? Look under the Tools menu, Options..., Load/Save
category on left, General tab, Save AutoRecovery information every (15)
minutes. (15 minutes is the default setting)

Btw, I wouldn't expect any Registry settings to be able to prevent HD
usage. If any program tries to do anything with a file, the Windows
operating system (at a low level) will obey and attempt to open the
file, and then assign a file handle for the program to use to access
that file. If the Registry could prevent that, then your operating
system would be a memory manager from that point forward. How would you
get back disk access? Without disk access, you'd be limited to the few
programs that were already loaded into your current memory space.
Executing programs, accessing files, and managing memory is what the
operating system is there for. Remember the original name, DOS (Disk
Operating System)? So what you're wanting to do is not so trivial.

The disk monitoring utility I mentioned at the very top of this message
should help you find "the culprit." While typing this response I've
observed that my desktop PC hasn't made a single disk access, and I've
had OpenOffice Writer open the entire time.

Let me know if any of these suggestions helped and if you find the
"culprit" that's accessing your hard drive.

John

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