Why would there be disk activity in sleep mode on Vista?

[yoda313]

Ok I've left my vista pc on sleep mode overnight. I had disk access the whole time!?!?!? What's up with that?

I didn't leave any programs on. I wasn't encoding or downloading. I just had it in sleep mode.

I do have norton 2009 but I don't think it was doing a scan all night.

Is there surefire way to kill programs for sleep mode to be truly silent?

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[redwudz]

Move the PC away from your bed? Vista can use downtime to index drives and do other OS related chores, though that seems odd for it to be able to run during sleep mode. Maybe something in the settings? My Vista PCs HDD lights are always flashing during normal operation and I gave up trying to figure out what the OS was doing.

Or never use sleep mode again and use hibernation instead? I just turn mine off at night.

[guns1inger]

You can turn indexing off if you want, however Vista also defrags in the background as well as part of the new maintenance and performance regime. That said, are you sure it is truly in sleep mode ? My laptop is very quiet in sleep mode.

[yoda313]

@redwudz and guns1inger - I guess I've never heard of indexing for vista. Also it does do auto defragging? Thats great news. I do have two drives in the pc and one is a 500gb drive I use for downloaded video. Could it have been defragging that beast overnight?

And @ guns1inger - how much more does it need to be in sleep mode besides clicking start - sleep???

[redwudz]

It could be defragging, you can click on a drive and then 'Properties>Tools>Defragmentation' and you should see a schedule. I still don't know that it can do that in sleep mode. Indexing is a bit of a PITA. You may notice lots of disc activity at odd times, and that may be what it's doing. But the plus side is searches are almost instantaneous if the drive has been indexed.

[thymej]

Your computer is having a nightmare that its become a Apple. You know its dreaming because of the rapid eye movement (oops, rapid disk movement).

If the computer woke up to do a defrag or index, then the computer is no longer sleeping. Something woke it up or it never went to sleep.

thymej

[yoda313]

@redwudz - yep it had a scheduled defrag for both drives. Didn't know that. Thanks for the input. Same to thymej.