Hard Drive Activity during Idle time on XP Laptop

Work laptop, after idle for a while, starts churning the disk until I come back and wake it up.

Based on google groups searches, seems to be one of following:

• Indexing service for that drive (turn this off in properties for the drive)
  
• System Restore cab'ing up files for a restore point (can only turn off all of system restore).
  
• Optimizations XP makes, moving files to faster sections of the drive (don't know how to turn this off)

But....why doesn't this happen on my desktop? (It has indexing turned on, and System Restore enabled)

The saga continues....

Ok, found the problem (I think).

Set Local security policy to track process starts/stops. Found that defrag.exe and dfrgntfs.exe would run during the idle / screen saver time.

Found info about it on this Windows XP A to Z page, they talk about the prefetch mechanism that moves files around on disk to make XP boot/run faster.

In case the page is gone someday, the info to disable:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
EnablePrefetcher
0 = disabled
1 = Application launch prefetching
2 = Boot prefetching
3 = both

temp files and organization are done in <windir>\PreFetch.
Look at layout.ini where the optimal storage layout is described.


keywords: hard drive hd spin constantly activity idle xp laptop


Posted 10:13 AM    |    0 comments    |    Permalink