Finding Out What Is Accessing The Hard Disc

[Page]

I can call up task manager and see the processes and have loads of spare cpu cycles.

But the machine is sometimes at a crawl due to constant hard disc access.

How can I find out what is doing all this hard disc access

[OldWelshGuy]

is the disk fragmented, or full?

[computer storm]

What version of windows are you running is it XP or Vista

[Kev Jaques]

Open up task manager, goto view and select columns, choose i/o read bytes and i/o write bytes, GDI Objects (more objects can mean slower performance) but your looking mainly for IO
Order by those byte columns desc
Typical major usage is virus scanners, web browsers.

However, the Java runtimes have been known to take up too much IO needlessly, you can disable this as it only needs to be running when you need to use Java related applets etc..

[Page]

Thanks all.

I have managed to find the "crook" it was mozy after a crash and getting ready to back up.

I left it for about 15 mins without doing anything else and when its status changed from getting ready to actually backing up the very heavy disc access stopped.

[paul1664]

For me Vista was the culprit. It started out okay but just disk activity just got more and more over time. I'm looking forward to moving to 7, the beta of which I've been running for a few months now, which seems to exhibit far less disk activity.

[This is the point where somebody pipes up advocating Linux]