My hard drive is constantly working. How do I find out what background programs are running and whether they are necessary?
by 
Michael Fregeau
ANSWERS: 3
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What OS is it? If it's win xp, pressing ctrl/alt/del together, will bring up the active processes window. It will show you what programs are running and the amount of system resources that each is using. You may choose to "end process'" from this window. A word of caution, some process' are critical and must run. Terminating them will terminate your windows session. You may also set application priorities here. A good program to use to determine what should and should not be running, is called "HijackThis". It can be found here http://www.tomcoyote.org/hjt/ , follow the instructions and post your log. It may take a day or two for a tech to get back to you, but keep an eye on your message thread. Hijack, logs all processes running on your pc and registry relationships. By submitting the log, you will be able to determine if there's any malware running or programs that don't need to be running.
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Besides investigating what processes are running on your PC, constant hard drive activity can also be a sign of excessive swap file use. In other words, Windows is trying to run all the processes you are running in RAM memory, but it cannot because you don't have enough. So it uses a swap file on the hard drive - constantly. Do you have less than 512MB of RAM, yet have 6 or more programs open at once (that's pretty vague, I know)? That may be your issue.
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My wife has been using my old Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop (a 1GHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM) with XP Home for school work. She brought it home yesterday, complaining that it was running very slow. I found that on booting, the HD just kept on working it's heart out, long after the system had finished booting, causing everything else to slow to a crawl. Long story short, the Automatic Update service was the cause. It was set to automatically download and install. I stopped it, and everything settled back down to normal. I'll be burning an installer disc of SP3 from the ISO download for use to bring it up to date, then maybe I'll enable the Updater service again. Hope this helps someone else.
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