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Hard Drive Activity

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by gustavo_betancourt

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I have a Toshiba Satellite 2400-S201 laptop with Windows XP as its Operating System. I have noticed that, while the system is in idle, the hard drive likes to kick in every now and then. It makes a sound as if it was reseating on a track or something like that. It also tends to, every now and then kick in with a lot of activity. When it does this, I notice some processes that take up some paging, disk queue, and processor time resources. These processes are: svchost.exe, helpsvc.exe, crss.exe, dfrgntfs.exe, and defrag.exe. I know what defrag.exe and dfrgntfs.exe are for which I guess it is normal on Windows XP. Can anybody tell me what the other programs are and if it is normal for a hard drive on Windows XP not to stay "quiet" when the computer is idling?

9 replies

by lizzy

Hi,
I believe that you will find that svchost.exe can be for various services that are running. Here are a couple of good sites that will point you in the right direction:

http://www.modempool.com/loosecruise/msconfighelp.html

http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

(remove any spaces from the pasted URL's)
This one is usually pretty good, but seems to be down right now:

http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup_full.htm

I would question why defrag is running while there are other things going on. Is it set up in the Task Manager as a scheduled task? I would remove it unless it's set up by the network admin and simply run it once or twice a month when all other programs are shut down.

Also, check the Microsoft Windows XP site for information on these services that you find running.

by techkid

WinXP automatically defrags your hard drive every 3 days and uses the %windir%\Prefetch files as it's guide. These are your most frequently used files. It puts the files listed in this folder on the outside of the HD.

Try it for yourself. Deletethe contents of this folder (not the folder itself but the contents). Then open up word or excel or something and check the folder. You'll see that windows has created a wordblahblah.pf file.

You can periodically clear this folder so windows doesn't have such a large folder to work with.

by taxiflyer

Here is something I have been doing for many years and through several Windows Releases. T find out what the processes are that are running, go to Start->Search->Files and Folders then type in the name of the file in question, like svchost.exe, exactly. A list of files found will be produced. Right click on the file you want to know about, select "properties" and you will have information on everything about that file!

by ann_m

Windows xp also waits for quiet moments and indexes all the files for quicker access this is set up as a default..ie during win xp install and this can be changed by going to my computer right clicking on your hard drive and clicking on the generaltab look at the bottom of the box and see if indexing for faster access is checked if it is that is why your system is clicking

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