InterviewSolution
Saved Bookmarks
InterviewSolution
| 1. |
Solve : Unusual Hard drive activity? |
|
Answer» Symptoms: About 3 or 4 times a day, when opening an application, my hard drive activity light will stay solid (on) for about 15-20 seconds causing the computer to freeze for that amount of time. Usually the light will flash quickly when there is "normal" activity. This has been happening for the last few months. Check your running processes. There may be somehing happening in he background you are unaware of and don't want. What are you using for spyware/adware/virus protection? I thought of that and checked it as well, problem is there are so many processes running (about 30) and they all have obscure names that I really don't even know what they are for. But it seems to only happen when I first open an application. And I really thought it was because the disk needed defragmenting. As I said that helped a little but it STILL happens only for a slightly shorter duration. One thing I noticed was that on the Hard drive defragmenting chart (with the blue, red, green and white clusters) was that there is a huge white (free space) gap in between two large blue blocks. And I'm wondering if that might have anything to do with the problem. I would think all the contigous files should be all together. And I've made a few changes to my system but I honestly can't remember when the trouble began. I added a new hard drive, I added a new external DVD burner and added SEVERAL new programs. I have AnyDVD, Microsoft Anti-Spyware, AVG antivirus, Zone Alarm, all running in the background. I guess I'll try SHUTTING down all the background programs and see if that makes a difference. Try Ewido (free trial) and see what's up with it. http://www.ewido.net/en/ You may also want to run Hijack This and post the log file for careful analysis. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html I don't think the free space would account for this.Well I figured it out, and the solution was very bizzare, but at least it worked. And I'll post what I did just in case someone has a similar problem or could figure out why this happened. As I mentioned I tried all the normal scanning for viruses, adware, spyware, etc. But I knew I needed a utility program that actually showed what was going on with the hard drive in real time. The Windows Task Manager processes list is just too LONG and obscure to tell me what was going on. So, I finally found some freeware called Filemon http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html that shows a running real time list of what programs, files and directories are using the hard drive. What I discovered was kind of strange.... (Below is a sample of the print out, these lines actually went on and on and on, probably close to 100. Note that vsmon.exe was the file that was reading this file) Quote 12706 5:49:10 PM vsmon.exe:1800 READ D:\aatemp\HOMEDESIGNSUITEPLATINUM-1-WIN-US2.EXE SUCCESS Offset: 851968 Length: 32768 I have a directory on my computer to store downloaded files, mostly consisting of EXE setup files. There was one for a Home Designer software that I paid and downloaded (no warez) from the companies site. I discovered that the hard drive was looking at that file, over and over again, along with a couple of other EXE setup files and just bogging down my computer for about a minute before anything else happened. I burned all those temp files to a DVD, deleted them, and now everything is running very quickly and smoothly. I just don't understand how a setup file in an obscure directory on my D drive "D://aatemp" would be accessing the hard drive. But there you have. That little utility program finally saved me from weeks of intense frustration. thanks again for your advice, LeeeThat is strange, but glad you are up and running again. |
|