Disk activity light all the time on windows 7

justaquestion

Hi folks,

I have a seven year old quad core desktop with an SSD drive and it works fast enough, but starting to notice the disk activity blue light is on most of the time, so take it as a sign that some thing is busy.

I have done a Malwarebytes, avast and Spybot search and destroy, but everything coming up as clean.

I have tried the Resourece monitor in windows 7 and also a program called Glass Wire that is supposed to monitor Network activity, but can't pin anything down?

Any other ideas please as how I might discover what is is seemingly causing the SSD drive to be busy all the time?
Thanks a lot.

Lorian

start resource manager
go to the disk tab
Click on the column headinh "Total (B/Sec)"

This will show the processes (Image column) that are doing all the I/O. If you dont recognise what they are post a screen shot.

If that doesn't help download and install procmon (this is a little more effort):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

run procmon as an admin account. Accept the license.
click "ok" on the default filter set

Let it tun for a minute or two - you'll see the evet count going up on the bottom of the scrteen.

Go to Tools -> File Summary -> By Path
and it will show you which files have been busy.

Dont leave it running too long or you will run out of memory as by default it captures to RAM.

AndyPix

I would also try adw cleaner as it scans scheduled tasks and usually finds stuff that the others miss ..


Other than that, how much RAM is in the machine ?
Do you reboot it often ?


It could be constantly paging if you havent rebooted for a while or are low on RAM

justaquestion

Thanks for all replies, will work my way through the things suggested.


Its a 32 bit windows 7 with 4gb of ram. I reboot all the time.

System

It'll most likely be Windows Update. Windows Update on Windows 7 is seriously broken and can sit there for hours chugging through files as it builds up what can be described as a "tree" of system file versions to decide what files need updating and what don't.

Personally if it were me I'd download the latest Windows 10 installation disc ISO from Microsoft and burn to DVD, back up my files and install Windows 10 on it using the Windows 7 product key.

justaquestion

Tarambor wrote: »

It'll most likely be Windows Update. Windows Update on Windows 7 is seriously broken and can sit there for hours chugging through files as it builds up what can be described as a "tree" of system file versions to decide what files need updating and what don't.

Personally if it were me I'd download the latest Windows 10 installation disc ISO from Microsoft and burn to DVD, back up my files and install Windows 10 on it using the Windows 7 product key.

Thanks no I don't think its windows update as I have the setting sorted out to suit me, think it might be age of computer showing and programs like Avast that are taking up more resources, but not sure.

I do have windows 10 as dual boot on same computer but it tends to run a lot busier than 7, more of a noise from fans etc.

grumpycrab

As above - Task Manager (Performance) for Windows10, Resource Manager otherwise- will show what's hogging the disk. How much space is free on your C: drive (for Windows 7 and/or 10 for that matter)?

were

the free sysinternal utils suite from ms may help you.

The modules are Procmon and procexp are the ones I would look at

justaquestion

Thanks for all replies. Internet wouldn't work a few times when I rebooted, so I changed the Ethernet cable that runs from router to computer, just a short cable as router on top of tower. Internet seems fine again.

And this seems to have drastically cut down on the flashing led disk activity as well, so we'll see if this could have been the problem, though I didn't think it would be.

Thanks to everyone once again.