Windows 7 HD chattering

[pmanton]

I've got some sort of an indexing thing going on with Windows 7. I can hear the HD chattering away in the background almost constantly when I'm at the computer. I don't have any malware or virus that I can find. And I don't have any sort of a fast find enabled to my knowledge.

I do have Office 2007 installed. I know way back when, Office had an indexing thing going but if this Office has it I don't know how to know if it's running.

I did install iCloud and iTunes when I bought my iPad recently. I don't know if that's germane to the HD activity.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks

Paul
N1431A
N83803
2AZ1

 

[bbchien]

Paul, I'm running Win 7 64 bit. Mine did that until I defragged.

 

[flyingron]

Yeah, there's an annoying advanced search thing that gets turned on with certain office applications (most commonly OUTLOOK), you may wish to look into disabling.

 

[write-stuff]

Used to be a common problem with HDs called "thrashing". That was when people didn't have RAM measured in GBs. Pages of RAM would have to be temporarily stored on the disc in what was termed "virtual memory". Large applications were usually the culprit as well as stuff running in the background (which could be a problem in your case).

 

[Jim_R]

As others have mentioned, indexed search is enabled by default in Win7 and can cause background hard drive activity. (Note that there are dozens of other reasons you may be having background drive activity...it's not necessarily the search indexer.)

If you ever search your computer for files or email (if you use MS Outlook), this feature can be extremely helpful. It used to take me tens of minutes to do whole-computer searches on WinXP, but those same searches complete in seconds on my indexed Win7 machine.

The cost is the up-front time Windows spends indexing everything, which can take days the first time. That's mostly a one-time cost, though, since once the main index is built, then it only needs to be updated when data changes, which is easy for the background process to handle without you noticing.

Here's some basic info on the feature: Microsoft Win7 Search Index FAQ

You cannot disable the serach index feature without completely disabling Windows Search entirely (and Google can show you how to do that, if you want). You can, however, specify exactly what hard drive locations should be indexed, which can minimize the background activity. Instructions are here.

Going back to your original question, though, there's only one way to really figure out what's causing constant hard drive access: Review the system-level calls accessing the hard drive and see what process is making most of them. You can do this with a tool called Process Monitor, which can be downloaded from Microsoft here. This is a diagnostic / debugging tool, though, designed for developers, not end users. Be prepared for a flood of information--you're going to learn that your hard drive is accessed by a LOT of processes, and it happens all the time...