Often as I sit looking at a webpage or doing nothing at all, my computer will be actively making a constant irregular HD reading sound.
What are you doing Vista?
Is there something I can look at to see what’s busy? (other than task manager which shows me that system idle is 99 and everything else is 0, and occasionally something like svchost or sidebar or taskmgr will be 1, or :eek: even 2!)
Filemon from SysInternals will show you all disk activity in real time, every single write/read operation. It’s an amazingly useful program.
Now replaced by Process Monitor for most systems, I see.
One thing that took me time to get used to with Vista was its propensity for making a system checkpoint every time you install a piece of software, or update a system component; I didn’t always connect letting Windows Update kick off some time earlier with the sudden disk activity, until I used the Resource Monitor to track down what was doing all of the I/O. Windows Defender is also, be default, set to scan (daily at 2am, IIRC). Combine that with AVG, which can sometimes suddenly take over 80%+ on one CPU (especially if you’re downloading something or do a search with a lot of results on slow sites), and you realize that there is a lot going on in the background.
Filemon and Process Monitor are both handy, but the built-in Vista Resource Monitor is already very detailed, and more than sufficient for most of what anyone would want to do. (A quick way to get to it is from the button near the bottom of the page reached by the Performance tab of the Task Manager.)
Run DXDIAG and see how big the page file (swap file) is. If it’s more than a few hundred mb, you have memory swapping going on and that’s what it will be. The only “fix” is to add more Ram.