(Seemingly) random hard disk activity

[Brent212]

Something I've always wondered - when I have all applications closed, what is accessing my hard drive? I have a pretty minimal set of OS and driver processes running in the background, with nothing in the system tray, and yet if I sit by my computer for awhile (maybe watching television or whatever), all of the sudden I'll hear some disk activity for a few seconds, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. This happens even with the network cable unplugged, and after many hours of inactivity. I have one computer that I never turn off, and sometimes will go days without even turning on the monitor. It's not connected to a network, but even it isn't immune to the randomly-active hard drive. Are there OS background processes that simply log info to a file every so often? I'm running xp pro, but this has been the case with every operating system I've used, and seems to be pretty normal. I just became curious about it recently.

[Soopafresh]

Indexing Service will do that.

[Jayhawk]

Probably Indexing. You might want to check Scheduled Tasks in Control Panel. On some operating systems, a default task called Tuneup is scheduled. Another possibility is an application (like AVG Anti-Virus) which runs a scan everyday at a predetermined time. The Symantec (Norton) products also do a lot of update checking as do most of the HP applications.

[Brent212]

I've always disabled task scheduler and I never allow anything like a virus scanner to run in the background. Can't stand programs that install any sort background services, especially when the only benefit they seem offer is allowing a program to "start quicker".

I love it when you go to disable something like that and a dialog box pops up describing the benefits (sounding like an f-ing magazine advertisement), and says something like "are you SURE you want to disable real play quickstart??" No, I accidentally clicked in that little check box.

But I'm digressing...

[jackal70058]

I've had this same problem but in Windows 98SE. I don't know what it is. I turned off everything running to try and find it but I never did. The trouble came when it kept filling the virtual memory.

It stopped a while back on it's own. Never happen again. To this day I never know what it was. Wasnt antivirus, or index, or spyware, and anything like that, I know.