Disc light always on (XP Home, SP1)

**jimbeard** · 2004-01-24 20:33

In recent months, the disc activity light is nearly always on. However, the disc itself is audibly active only a normal amount. This is a Dell laptop. The only time that the light seems to properly reflect disc INactivity is soon after the OS is started (from restart or shutdown), before a number of applications have run. I have disc indexing turned off. Active processes are many, including Norton Personal Firewall and Antivirus (though I've used those for years without this peculiarity). Any idea what's going on? Any advice appreciated.

Jim Beard

**bigaldoc** · 2004-01-25 12:05

Could it possibly be a malfunctioning laptop? It sounds like this is something that just recently started from what you describe. Can you determine whether you've installed a piece of software recently that could be the culprit? How about spyware - do you have any detection software installed so you could give it a run to make sure a scumware program hasn't snuck in under the radar? <!post=Take a look here.,296439>Take a look here.<!/post> Regarding Task Manager, what do you note about the CPU column, if for example you watch it for awhile - does anything jump out at you there?

**jscher2000** · 2004-01-25 20:02

I see a similar phenomenon on my laptop, particularly toward the end of the day, or after heavy web use. I think there's some kind of file maintenance happening, but I haven't tried to understand the details. Occasionally I'll pop up the Processes tab of the Task Manager and marvel at the fact that I can't really derive any useful information from it!

**jimbeard** · 2004-01-25 20:26

Alas, I'm forever installing new software or removing old, so I can't say what was happening around the time this showed up. I do run antivirus and firewall software, and periodically run Ad-Aware and SpyBot. Haven't had particular problems there. I have spent many puzzled minutes gazing at the activity on Task manager, and am none the wiser for it.

**Rebel** · 2004-01-26 19:48

Jim,

Have you installed Norton Go Back? Just a shot in the dark, but this program does generate a great deal of disk activity.

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