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Anyone any idea why the hard drive on a lappy seems to be active all the time for no apparent reason,hard drive light is flashin like a foooka and seems to make it run slow at times. :evil:
Yes its not set up right.
You need to sort out the registry.
download and run this:
http://www.glaryutilities.com/gu.html?tag=download
defragment too maybe, I just bought myself a new hard drive, amazing how S ata hard drivers don’t come with Sata cables, so its in my machine doing nothing right now
anyone recomened any decent programs to use to clone? my current drive is a Sata 80 gig 8mb cache, new one is 500gb sata 32mb cache, would it even make any difference, would I be best just using the new drive as a secondary drive? thus not having to go through the whole clone saga
Generally speaking, all new Hard Drives (whether SATA or IDE/ribbon) come without cables – unless you find a ‘package deal’ somewhere. Data cables are always sold as accessories – as are power adaptors, where needed.
You should ensure that your motherboard supports SATA and that the power supply leads have the appropriate terminations to fit into the back of your new HDD.
I’m not terribly good at cloning but I think that PowerQuest comes reccomended so you might care to try that. Best thing is to backup all your data etc and go for a clean re-install of Windows onto your new HDD then restore your data to the new drive.
@reason wrote:
Anyone any idea why the hard drive on a lappy seems to be active all the time for no apparent reason,hard drive light is flashin like a foooka and seems to make it run slow at times. :evil:
I’m not convinced that it’s a defragmentation issue (although you might want to re-configure the Master File Table (MFT) to a higher value).
Generally hard disk ”churn” is caused by the ‘system idle process’ which sometimes appears to get itself locked into a loop. If you take a look at Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del) and click on the ‘Processes’ tab you can see how much system resource is being used by all the various processes running at the time – particularly those that run in the background like the system idle process.
I don’t know of a sure fire way to fix this other than to re-boot and see if it settles down after a short while.
God what are you two on?
Right whats happened is:
They have pre loaded software on a hard drive
Done about 500 in one go (like they do)
There been a problem, there’s things missing from windows and now he has to deal with it.
Its something simple like windows fast indexing playing up.
Saying that this k u n t probably didn’t update it when he first brought it.
Sorry DOA but I really disagree with you on this one. Fast indexing isn’t the root cause of Reason’s issue – it is the SIP.
The ‘System Idle Process’ runs in the background and (as its name suggests) runs when the system is apparently idle – i.e. doing nothing else. It is supposed to keep the processor running at a steady rate (close to 100% capacity) and is used by Windows NT to implement CPU power saving.
Problem is that it doesn’t always kick out straight away when you make other demands on the CPU. It produces exactly the symptoms that ‘Reason’ has described (i.e. the hard disk activity light is constantly flashing rapidly, even when the computer is doing nothing at the time and it appears to slow the operation of the computer down a lot).
I’ll bet he has two more symptoms that he hasn’t (yet) described. 1) when he opens up a blank Word document or Excel spreadsheet and starts to type or enter data, the screen ”hangs” for a few seconds, the cursor stops flashing, and then the letters that he typed suddenly all appear at once. 2) after a short time running slowly and ”hanging” etc, the system suddenly appears to free itself and goes at its normal speed as if nothing at all had previously happened.
This is because the System Idle Process finally recognises that the CPU now has a full activity load and releases the system resource that it had previously been hogging.
errrr right pb………… stop waffling on
I know this may seem like an odd question pb…………..
but what fooking advice would you give a novice computer user on how to fix it?
(in plain English less that 50 words, no techy stuff)
Whilst I like Pete’s response for its practical and down to earth approach…..
The non-techy solution (in less than 50 words – as requested) is:
“Use the CPU by giving the computer something to do. This will stop the System Idle Process from running. Alternatively, re-boot it and start over.”
I thank you. (Applause).
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