Hard drive always accessing

[andiol]

I have seen this problem posted here in the past but am unable to find the original thread. Please point me in the right direction.

I have two customers with the same problem running windows 98. Their computers are always accessing the hard drive even if they have been idle for over an hour. I have closed all the tasks running on the task window with the exception of windows explorer and this has no effect on whaever task is accessing the hard drive. This also slows down all other windows operation.

One computer is running NAV with the latest A/V definitions, the other is running F-PROT with the latest definitions as well. Although this does not rule out the possibility of a virus Its highly unlikely that it is a virus, and it has affected two unrelated computers. One of them has accessed the internet once in the last siz month's about three months ago.

Please help me identify the problem with these computers.

Thanks.

[ilovetheusers]

Wow, that's weird. Just for poops and giggles - how much ram do they have in them?

Run msconfig and see what they have loading up at start.

[NooNoo]

Might be worth fixing the virtual memory to 1.5 times the amount of ram... also turning off findfast if you have office installed, it can get hyperactive.

[Archer]

try Search and destroy just to see if theres anything untowards installed on the system also I suggest you run a DOS antivirus from a clean boot disk also,you never know.

[condor]

I would try the following things:

1. in windows 98 Computers add the following line to [386enh] section of your system.ini

ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1


2. In NAV and F-prot you should verify that you're only scaning program files and not all files (NAV has the "SmartScan" feature)

3. You can experiment with Vcache values in your system.ini as well. A good configu is usually

MinFileCache=4096
MaxFileCache=4096
ChunkSize=512

close the config files and reboot.


One more tip: Sometimes you have some programs running in the background so you might want to use the Kernel Toys to see what processes are running.


Hope it helps.

[craigmodius]

According to taskmanager, available here I have 22 running processes. A ctrl+alt+del says 9 things.

So you might want to check that out to get a better picture as to what might be the offender.

[Platypus]

It's not just the Auto Insert Notification for a CD-ROM drive flicking the drive activity LED is it?

[imaeditedbysowulo]

Originally posted by craigmodius
According to taskmanager, available here I have 22 running processes. A ctrl+alt+del says 9 things.

So you might want to check that out to get a better picture as to what might be the offender.

Cool program...thanks!

[confus-ed]

Originally posted by NooNoo
Might be worth fixing the virtual memory to 1.5 times the amount of ram... also turning off findfast if you have office installed, it can get hyperactive.

Get's my vote.

[craigmodius]

Originally posted by imaeditedbysowulo


Cool program...thanks!

Well actually, credit where credit is due, you have Techs to thank. I found that after reading his thread here

I just was too lazy or didn't have time to credit him in my first post

Better late than never

[andiol]

Thanks all of you to for your suggestions. Have added them to my data bank of useful tips.

Actually I found the answer to both problems running msconfig and removing a whole bunch of programs that were running in the background and adding nothing but confussion to the mess. Apparently one of the guys had at one time or another loaded Office, Corel And AMI and only used wordpad sporadically. Removed all the unnecessary start up programs and this appear to have solved the problem.