Why is my hard drive continually running the Boston Marathon?

For a couple of weeks now, my home PC (that the kids have full access to) is con-fucking-tinually crunching something. It’s slow. It’s annoying. I look in Task Manager and, well, it looks as “normal” as before. How can I tell what the hell is being written/read from/to my hard drive constantly while I’m just surfing away and doing nothing else? Oh, and when I first wake the damned thing from a slumber it takes minutes before I can even open a browser (due to beaucoup d’activity).

Suggestions?

In task manager, under the processes tab, you can use the “view” menu to select any number of metrics concerning i/o. Add a few to the table, sort by them, and see which ones seem to be eating it up. I keep I/O read bytes on the list, sort by it, and usually the offending process is in the top 20 processes. Then it’s a matter of looking up what that process is and finding out how to fix it or uninstall it.

Any chance the drive is either badly fragmented, running out of free space or both? Those can cause disk thrashing which sounds like what you’re experiencing.

To check: Open up My Computer and choose View-Details. This will show total size and free space of your drive(s). If it’s getting very full, time to do some spring cleaning.

Right-click the drive and choose Properties. Click on the Tools tab, then the Defragment Now button. Highlight the drive letter and choose Analyze. This will take a few seconds and tell you if you ought to defrag, if you do, kick it off before you go to bed since it’ll take a while. Before you actually start the defrag I would disconnect from your network and close all applications including your antivirus (anything that’s trying to access the harddrive in the background will make it take longer). The next morning restart your a/v, reconnect to your network and see if things are working better.

Some Suspects in most to least likely order

1: Some hidden malware/virus worm running in the background that the kids have inadvertently installed

2: New program installed with multiple “always on” update etc applets (Itunes etc) gobbling up resources - New anti virus program

3: Failing drive

4: Program installed to interface with new hardware (printer driver - PDA sync applet etc, that constantly polls the hardware

5: Someone has installed a keylogger on your system to track your use.

Do you have more than one login on the computer? Someone else could still be logged in and have apps running. Make sure when you look at Task Manager you check “Show processes from all users.”

How does it run when you reboot it?

Great suggestions all. Thanks. I’ll report back.

I’m not sure if this might be a related question but should a pc have 9 SVCHOST.EXE’S running, that take up 67,000k of memory?.

svchost is a generic process used for running Windows services, which are pretty vital. Task Manager won’t tell you much about what each one is doing, but you can sometimes find out more with e.g. SysInternals’ Process Explorer. If you’re concerend about them you should look through your services list (run services.msc) and disable any that you know (I emphasise “know”) that you don’t need.

Ivan, I have 7 svchost.exe’s running right now but they’re drawing about 22K.

I need to corner and kill a similar problem and it will drive you nucking futs. Reading with interest here…

I run a Hitman program from time to time. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a bunch of freeware stuff strung together. For instance, Ad-Aware, Spybot, and other stuff have been available for free for a long time. You could get them individually and update/execute each selectively, but Hitman coordinates them. When you click to update, it updates them all; then you start it, and it automatically executes one after the other. When it finishes, it can automatically shut off the computer as well, so it’s the sort of thing you can start before going to bed.

In my case, I don’t think it’s malware etc. I probably have way too much shit on the start menu. I’m going to have to add this as a weekend project.

Internet Explorer is sometimes a culprit. I use tabbed browsing and sometimes when the puter slows down, I go into task mgr. I think when it starts it might be drawing 40K. Right now it’s 58K. I’ve seen it up at 200K and climbing for no apparent reason when the puter becomes unresponsive.

I suspect it’s because there are pop ups running…for instance I go into imdb to look up something and that goddamn “Classmates.com” ad pops up. Well it gets shoved into the background but it’s still there. So I kill it, but no joy: task mgr shows IE still sucking mammary, er, memory, like a wild child at mama’s titty. WTF?

If I kill IE completely, then reopen it, ok, it’s pulling more like 35K.

Right now, I see CPU usage at 5% but PF usage at almost 1Gb. This, I know, is bad. I’m not intentionally running lots of programs but have 68 processes.

Someone will be along to correct me but back in the day (Windows 98) some fixes were:

  1. Clean off your desk top (I need to do that, badly).
  2. Clean out your temporary internet files (and set your browser so it doesn’t store cookies forever)
  3. Take programs that you don’t use off the startup menu.
  4. Defragment the hard drive.
  5. Run anti-virus (etc.) software.

If all these fail, set fire to the damn thing, claim it on your insurance, and buy a new one. After backing up your data on an external hard drive, I mean.

As said above, those are normally nessacery, but I’ve seen them hide a virus before (if any of them ask permission to access the internet, say no. Trust me.)

I have one that is running 30,000k of memory. Can I just end the process to see what happens? How do I determine more details about this process?

I tried that once.
I had to restart the computer.

Remember some of those are vital to your system.

Do you dare me? :smiley:

Just did it, and nothing noticeable happened. What’s all that about? :confused:

Do you have enough memory? Lack of it is the most common cause of what you describe.

It’s also possible that you have a virus or spyware that doesn’t show up on the Task Manager. Try downloading hijackthis, running a scan, and sending it to a place like www.spywareinfo.com to have someone interpret the log.

Try tasklist /svc from a command prompt to see what esch svchost is for. To find a particular svchost, look for it’s process ID (PID). You can find this in Task Manager by addng the PID column.