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Hard Drive never stops running

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tep0583

MIS
Jun 14, 2001
56
US
I have a wierd problem with a machine running win2k. The hard drive runs nearly constantly. At any given time CPU usage is at 1% and the memory useage is at 150884K / 371412K (160MB of this is physical SDRAM, the rest is swapfile). Running anything takes several seconds longer than expected (ie opening a new memo in Notes takes 12-15 sec.) and overall system speed seems quite sluggish. The machine is a Compaq EN seies with a 400MHz PII and 160MB of RAM. Has anybody seen this sort of behaviour?
 
Commments inline >>

The hard drive runs nearly constantly.
>> Your hard drive is always spinning, what do you mean by this.


At any given time CPU usage is at 1% and the memory useage is at 150884K / 371412K (160MB of this is physical SDRAM, the rest is swapfile)
>> ...this is a problem? How many applications and services are running at this point, anything running in the background takes CPU and memory.

Running anything takes several seconds longer than expected (ie opening a new memo in Notes takes 12-15 sec.) and overall system speed seems quite sluggish
>> Does Notes have to load up first? What all do you have running in the background? General recommendation is 256 MB of RAM for a Win2k machine, becuase it _LOVES_ memory.

>> To me it seems like you have a normal computer that may need more memory because if you have Word, Excel, Notes, and other programs all open at the same time, it takes up a ton of memory. Mike Wills
RPG Programmer (but learning Java)

"I am bad at math because God forgot to include math.h into my program!"
 
Another item that will slow you down is setting up the Journal in MS Outlook. This basically opens another journal item anytime you start one of the apps that are associated. Check the journal settings in Outlook if you have it and make sure you only setup the ones you absolutely want to be tracked. I disabled all of mine!
 
I mean the drive never stops spinning. It is constantly running. The drive light is always on, the drive is always making noise (not idle noise, read/write noise, constand access). Memory usage is NOT a problem, I put it there to illustrate the computer is not over-using virtual memory. backgroud app include Norton Auto-protect, the office toolbar, and a few other network-related apps and services. Notes is the only heavy-duty app running. Notes is already open, it only has to open a blank email. I would normally consider this a possible memory problem, but we have lessor machines running win2k without this delay and constant hard drive thrashing.

No outlook in this machine, thanks for the idea though.
 
Sorry, I thought you we outright complaining about Windows 2000. What you could do is in the monitoring program (for the life of me I can't rember what it is called at the moment) add in columns for I/O operations, and see what is continuously doing I/O operations. That might help. Mike Wills
RPG Programmer (but learning Java)

"I am bad at math because God forgot to include math.h into my program!"
 
I like that idea, I'll see if I can find it and monitor it.

Complain about Microsoft's best OS to date? Au contraire (sp? I think it's something like that). I love 2000. It is what I run on my main PC and its been running like a dream for the last year+. I love throwing that in the face of the guys that claim you cannot do that with Win2k, much less 98 (my 98SE drive has been running pretty much flawlessly for about as long)
 
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