Recently I noticed that the hard drive activity light on my HP notebook computer (running Windows Vista) is constantly flickering. This new behaviour (which has not happened during the past two years of owning this computer) does not seem to affect performance but I am puzzled about the cause. I suspect some kind of indexing or scanning process has been surreptitiously introduced but don’t know how to track it down. Similar hard drive activity occurs when I run the regular virus scan but what I’ve got now happens all the time. My research using the internet has revealed a number of possible causes, none of which seem relevant to my situation. One item I came across suggested that it is possible to detect which process is causing the non-stop hard drive activity but there were no details provided as to how this is achieved. I gather it is a matter of using Task Manager but I have not been able to figure out how. Do you have any suggestions?

You are correct that some background program or process is likely indexing or scanning the computer causing the constant hard drive activity. That said, it is also possible that there is some malfunctioning process running behind the scenes which is attempting to complete its operation but is not working correctly, since even a process completing an indexing or scanning operation should not constantly be accessing and causing activity on the hard drive. Not to alarm, but in some cases malware or a virus could also be causing this behaviour (although this is a less likely situation, but something that we should consider nevertheless). We will begin by doing some investigations in an attempt to narrow down the root cause of the problem. The first procedure involves disabling all programs and processes which have been configured to automatically load when Windows starts. By disabling these programs and processes if the problem then stops we know that one of those items is the cause of the problem. Go to the “Start” menu and in the Search box type “msconfig” (without the quotes) and press ENTER. The System Configuration Utility window should appear. This is a fairly high-level interface that allows you to manage the Windows startup process. Click the “Startup” tab and this will list all of the programs and processes which load on Windows startup. The items with a tick beside their name are currently enabled and will load on startup, whereas the items without a tick are disabled and will not load on startup. Before making any changes, write down the names of all of the items which are currently enabled (so that we can re-enable these later once we have finished troubleshooting). Now that you have got all those names written down, click the “Disable all” button at the bottom of the window. This will disable all of the items from loading on startup. Click the OK button to save and close then restart the computer. Once Windows restarts it should no longer automatically load any of those startup items, as they have all been disabled.

After Windows has finished restarting check whether the problem continues or has ceased. Should the problem have ceased then one of those startup processes was causing the constant hard drive activity issue and now it will just be a matter of tracking down the exact program or process which was causing the problem. Go back into the System Configuration Utility > “Startup” tab. Re-enable one of the previously enabled processes (as noted on your list), click OK to save and close, then restart the computer and check whether the problem re-occurs. If not, repeat the same procedure to re-enable another process. Continue this until you eventually find that the problem happens again, at which point it is a fair assumption that the most recently enabled process is the one causing the problem. At this point you should be able to re-enable the remainder of the programs and processes, but leaving the problem item disabled. Now that you have determined the exact item causing the problem you should do some research as to the nature of that program or process. Using the name of the item, do some research in Google (or your favourite search engine) and see whether you can find out more information on what the program or process is suppose to do. Furthermore, you may even find other users who have experienced the same issue and have a potential resolution. However, if there is no resolution available and you determine that you don’t need the functionality which that process provides, then you could just leave it disabled. That said, if you do need the functions which it provides, then you may wish to see whether an updated version is available that perhaps resolves the problems with the current version.

Of course, it is possible that after disabling all the startup items that the problem still continues. In this case it would be a reasonable assumption that the startup items are not causing the problem. However, before we re-enable all of the startup items there are some additional items which we should also try disabling. Return to the System Configuration Utility and click the “Services” tab. Services are a different category of background process and most Windows computers have quite a few services running in the background designed to perform long-running tasks which do not require any user interaction. In contrast, the items which load on the Startup tab generally do have some kind of user interaction. Since these services are running in the background one of these could also be causing the problem. However, we need to be careful when disabling the services since quite a few are system services required for Windows to function correctly. As a rule of thumb, you should not disable any Microsoft services since they are generally ones required for the successful operation of Windows. So, tick the box at the bottom of the window that says “Hide all Microsoft services”. You will notice that the list of services should not be substantially reduced. Take note of which services are currently enabled and then click the “Disable all” button. Click OK to save and close, then restart the computer.

Once the computer has finished restarting follow the same procedure as we completed for the startup items – if the problem does not continue then sequentially start re-enabling the services until the problem does happen, at which point you have tracked down the service causing the problem and can leave that disabled while conducting some additional research on the service. However, you could find yourself in the situation where disabling the services does not resolve the issue. So we can conclude at this point that none of the start items or startup services are the cause. Before proceeding any further you should now make sure that you re-enable all of the startup items and services which were previously enabled, and then restart your computer so that they all successfully reload and your computer is restored to its original state.

We now will need to look at alternative means of tracking down the cause of the constant hard drive activity. You mentioned in the question about the possibility of using the Task Manager to track down the problematic process causing this behaviour. If a process is accessing the hard drive constantly then it will generally be using the computer processor (CPU) at the same time, since it is reading (and potentially writing) data and thus requires the CPU in order to complete these operations. Therefore, we can look in the Task Manager for any processes which are using a large amount of the CPU. Before doing so, make sure that you close any open programs (including those in the system tray, next to the clock, if possible) so that we get the least interference during the process. Then, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to open the Task Manager. In the Task Manager window click the “Processes” tab. You should see a CPU column which lists the percentage of the CPU being used for a particular process. Click the CPU column heading to sort the table by CPU usage. Monitor the processes with the top CPU usage for a few minutes. Should you notice that the same process has high usage for a long period of time (and there is also constant hard drive activity) then it is possible that particular process could be causing the activity. Write down the name of the process and we will now terminate that process to check whether the hard drive activity stops. Select the process in the table and then click the “End Process” button. After about a minute has passed check to see whether the hard drive activity has stopped. If so, then you have just found the process causing the problem. At this point you should do some searching on the internet for the process name to check whether other users have encountered this problem. The most likely cause would be something like an on-access virus scanner which is completing scans of all files that open on your computer, which is quite a lot when you consider the number of file open and close operations that happen behind the scenes without your knowledge (just as part of normal Windows operations). Hopefully this would just be a bug and an update available which resolves the issue, or perhaps a configuration change on your computer. If you have difficulty finding information on the process then please send the details to me and I can also have a look around for any useful information.

Be aware, if you find that the process name is a random jumble of letters (e.g. awjasiyw.exe), and you cannot find any information on the internet about the process, then it is likely that process is some kind of virus or malware, which would also explain the constant hard drive activity. In this case you should immediately update your antivirus scanner and complete a full virus scan of the computer. If the virus scanner does not detect anything then we have a larger problem, since we probably have a virus and the antivirus scanner cannot find the virus infected files. In this case you may wish to temporarily load a different virus scanner onto the computer which can hopefully detect and remove the threat. It may also be useful to download and install Ad-Aware Free (www.lavasoft.com) and Spybot Search & Destroy (www.safer-networking.org) to complete a scan of your computer for any potential malware or spyware that could be installed.