My Hard Drive Runs Almost All the Time

[Frank Jr.]

My OS is XP. I have noticed since I replaced the hard drive in my computer at home that when I leave the computer on over night the hard drive light indicates that it is running wide open the next morning. When I try to check what is running with the task manager it stops. I can't find any processes in the task manager that would cause this. I have tried to research this and found someone indicated that the drive maybe indexing. Should I leave it on for days to see if that is the problem? Other than that the computer works fine. Obtw it is maxed out with 2gigs of memory

 

[diogen]

When was the OS installed? How old is the computer?
Any software installed recently? Running something like seti@home?

Hard drive activity through the night can't be explained by indexing
no matter how big a hard drive and even under Vista.

Diogen.

 

[navychop]

Defender? Some Symantec product?

 

[Frank Jr.]

It's almost 4 years old. The hard drive was replaced about 4 months ago. I installed a fresh copy of xp about a month ago.

 

[Frank Jr.]

Oh and yep NIS.

 

[Frank Jr.]

I also have noticed that when I click off the internet I have a white screen for a second or two. When I am using the computer such as using outlook or streaming video it seems to run normally. But left idol for about 10 seconds it starts running wide open again.

 

[diogen]

Get rid of NIS.
Even if it isn't the reason, it will do only good to your PC.

Maybe someone turned your PC into a ftp/web server...

Diogen.

 

[Van]

For it to be running constantly it sounds like its crunching numbers wich is what something like seti@home does to name just a few programgs out there. When you go into the start menue it will show a list of recent apps used and tiles them by most active to list active from top to bottom, if theres a calculator in there at the top then somethings running numbers alot. I get that with a program called BOINC that a bunch of diferent programs run on including seti@home. If it takes roughly 10 mins before this starts up then its along the lines of an idle delay timer like on a screen saver wich the seti@home program runs, also xp defaults to a screen saver after 10 mins time.

 

[GaryPen]

Are you using any file-sharing programs like LimeWire or BitTorrent? They run in the background, and might be uploading stuff.

Also, and this is a very real possibility, despite Norton Internet Security, you may have Spyware. Spybot S&D and Spyware Terminator are excellent applications for finding and removing spyware.

 

[Frank Jr.]

Are you using any file-sharing programs like LimeWire or BitTorrent? They run in the background, and might be uploading stuff.

Also, and this is a very real possibility, despite Norton Internet Security, you may have Spyware. Spybot S&D and Spyware Terminator are excellent applications for finding and removing spyware.

I tried them both. Spyware Terminator seems the easiest to use. It found 8 critical items and they were removed. Thanks! However the hd still runs constantly when the computer is idle. I think I found why. I think I have a corrupt windows file. I have two separate paging files and cannot delete but one of them. After deleting the only one I can and then want to put it back Windows indicates that a pagefile already exists do you want to over write this file. When I do it doesn't over write this file. It just installs an additional paging file.

 

[snathanb]

If it was my computer doing it, I would boot windows into safe mode and see if it continues. This would typically rule out an offending application.

 

[Frank Jr.]

Thanks all of you for your help. Issue solved. Installed my OS again and the drive has stopped running when the computer is idle. I was hoping to avoid doing that. Thanks again for all the help guys.