How can I tell why my HD keeps active all the time? OS=WinXPSP2?

Question

My hard drive seems like it's always busy doing something even when the computer is not in use. How can I tell (with freeware) what is causing it to access all the time?

Answer 1

Double or triple your RAM and you will probably see a huge difference!
also get a RAM recovery tool like freemem

Answer 2

No need to buy software to start with.

Start by doing a CTRL-ALT-DELETE to view the task manager, go to the process tab and see which program is occupying your system resources. You can look at the performance tab to view the usage by the resources, you can look at the networking tab to see if it's your internet connection that's causing this (could be spyware).

This is a prelim exam - you may see something curious, if you do, don't act on it immediately, but take notes and ask a techie.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Press control-alt-delete to open task manager. Select processes tab and you will see which processes are currently running and using CPU resources or memory. hint: if you click on the heading it will sort in order. Or try autoruns , a program [freeware] found at www.sysinternals.com

Answer 4

The simple solution is to pull up the Task Manger (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and see what processes are running. There are certain programmes that can be either scheduled to run or run in the background such as anti-virus/spyware scans, defrag/optimisation or even Google desktop.

As long as you check your virus and spyware programmes I wouldn't worry about it too much. You could use msconfig (Start > Run > type "msconfig") and see what is programmes are actually started when you turn the machine on

Answer 5

If you don't have much RAM it might be busy because it's swapping a lot of memory out to disk.