I call “gurgling” what you hear when you close your files and put the computer to sleep.
So, just a while ago, this computer has been “gurgling” for at least ten minutes till I put an end to it by putting it to sleep. I wasn’t using it. Just before, I’d downloaded Google Desktop, but I don’t see the relation… So what was it doing the while ? Anything to worry about ?
(Windows XP Home, if that makes any difference).
It may be accessing the hard drive. Google Desktop indexes while you’re not using it.
It is definitley the hard drive. It is just running some secret little job that waits until the computer is not being used. It could be doing anything from a virus or spyware scan to indexing of files. Most computers with lots of utlities on them do that. My computer is set to do backups to an external hard drive and it does the same thing.
Yeah, I think that’s disk access you are hearing.
Defragmenting your drive might reduce that.
If you are using Windows XP:
START->All Programs->accessories->system tools->disk defragmentor
Of course, with everything that’s out there these days, you can never be completely sure what your computer is up to when it just starts churning away. It could be streaming midget porn to schoolkids in Malaysia for all we know.
When your computer is idle, not only are there processes running which could be accessing the disk (as previously mentioned), but there is also windows itself accessing the disk. Windows keeps what is called a “swap file”. Basically, you don’t ever want to completely run out of memory because then the computer can’t function, so most operating systems (including windows) take a bunch of disk drive space and treat it as “extra” memory. If you have 512 MB of RAM and 1 GB of swap file space, you effectively have 1.5 GB of “memory”. Pages of memory that aren’t used often are swapped out onto the disk (that’s why it’s called a swap file), and the most often used stuff is kept in the RAM so that it is accessed more quickly. Linux does the same thing, but it uses a partition on the disk for the swap instead of a file on the regular partition like windows does.
When Windows is bored, he periodically decides to “optimize” his swap file in the hope that after he’s done re-arranging things, that the computer will run faster. Hey, he doesn’t have anything else to do. You’ve left him idle.
Goodlge Desktop is the primary “culprit” here. As soon as you install it, it waits for the computer to be idle, then it goes to town and starts reading through all your files to build its index.
Aside from Google Desktop, there’s a lot of other processes that run behind your back, so to speak. Microsoft Office (if you have it) also does file indexing, and your email application is probably set up to look for mail every 10-15 minutes. Beyond that, Windows does seem to get lonely, and if you’re not paying attention to it, it will go off and do things to keep itself busy.
Most definitely Google Desktop. It indexes your hard drive. I usually pause the indexer while I’m doing a lot of work on my computer.
“Gurgling” reminds me of an old DOS joke.
You loaded this program, and it printed “C:>” to the screen, looking like the standard prompt, and then sat there waiting for any key to be pressed. Then it went:
“Error: water on C: drive”
“Draining C: drive” (appropriate water draining away sound effects)
“Spin drying C: drive” (appropriate spin dryer sound effects)
“Cleanup complete, C: drive ready”
Then the program ended, and exited to the normal “C:>” prompt.
(Yeah, we were easily amused back the!)
Gee, I wonder if that program is still available for Win XP?
Instructive answers. Now I know a little more about how computers function. Still have a long way to go…
Thanks everyone.
Since the question has been answered, I’ll pop in with my own terminology.
I’ve always called the hard disk access noise “thinking.” I’m sure it arose because, when I was first using computers and I tried to open a file or perform a disk-intensive operation, the hard drive churned and there was a delay. Clearly, the computer was thinking about the problem.
And, yes, I know all about how computers work and that the hard drive doesn’t have anything to do with actual processing.
Really? Do you mean that it defrags the swap file, or does something else? I’d be surprised if whatever rearranging it’s doing in the background is going to perform any better than LRU paging.
I call it hitting the disk. And just to lead us all astray, my career goes back to the days of disk drives the size of washing machines. When a really big program got running and started accessing one of those babies, you could see it. We used to joke that a really wild program would vibrate a drive right out into the street.
In those days, memory violations were also quite common. You write IBM assembler code long enough, you are going to get one. We joked that the program was trying to address memory across town…
The data on your disk drive is arranged in rings called “tracks”. Each track is subdivided into “sectors”. The disk can read all of the sectors on one track without moving the disk head, since the entire track will rotate under the head as the platter spins around. The noise you hear from a disk drive is when the head has to reposition itself over another track (called a track to track seek). If you are writing a lot of data, the head is going to be bouncing around from track to track to track, which results in that “gurgling” noise in the OP. The drive makes no sound while it’s actually reading and writing the data, other than the sound the spinning platters make (kind of a very quiet constant whine). It’s only when it is moving the head to get ready to read or write data that you get the noise.
Microsoft has been a little vague on the details in everything I’ve read about how they optimize their swap file. Your guess is as good as mine about exactly what they are doing. I know that back in the days of windows 98 that whatever they were doing often made the system slower when you started using it again, so any time I’d be sitting at my desk and I could hear the thing start to optimize its swap file, I would do something with the computer just to make it quit fiddling with the swap. The swap file management seems to be a lot better in 2000/XP.
Once as a joke, we put the “draining water from C drive” thing into the autoexec.bat on our boss’s computer. He went running to IT screaming bloody murder about how his computer had gotten a virus, so out of fear of losing our jobs we kept quiet and didn’t tell him that it was a joke that we had played on him.