Why does my hard drive go crazy with activity occasionally?

Question

Usually after inactivity but not always my hard drive just goes nuts doing whatever it does. I am not working with a lot of files and sometimes I don't do anything. I just starts whirring away for ten or more minutes at a time. I don't have any scheduled backups or scans or anything like that when it does this. It is very annoying because when it is doing this I can't do much else because it is so busy.

Answer 1

If you have Office installed, this may also be caused by FindFast. If that's the case, remove it from the Startup folder and reboot, that might fix it.

Also, make sure your system is clean of malware.

One good and easy way to troubleshoot this is to open up Task Manager and use the Processes tab to find out which process is using the disk, just check the CPU usage there when the activity begins.

Answer 2

you probably have an old machine. One that would have about a 2gig to 10 gig hard drive. More than likely it is running windows 98, but you can get these machines up to windows XP. If it has a hard drive as I described, then there is nothing you can do about the noise, those older hard drives just do that. You could get a bigger hard drive like a 20 Gig, but with those older mother boards and their touchy BIOS, you are likely to have problems installing the operating system on it, so that it can be used as the primary. The older machines also need the master hard drive set to cable select and if you put another drive with it, then that drive would also need to be set to cable select.

Answer 3

check for index store servers that keep a running tally of everything on your pc, sucks up the CPU and makes it run hot... Nero is a big one, so is google desktop.

Answer 4

when it happens again
open task manager and click process tab

its probably your anti virus software

hope you dont use norton

Answer 5

it's hard question!!!! so good luck!!!!!!!!