WinXP Hard Drive usage

24-05-2002, 09:46 PM

Every time I leave WinXP idol for a while, I come back to find the hard drive being accessed continuously and this stops when I move the mouse. Could it be my Norton Antivirus 2002 at work? Or is it something else within Xp itself?

24-05-2002, 10:04 PM

Have a look to see what processes are running using the windows task manager: <ctrl> <alt> <del> in Win2k...probably the same in XP.

This sounds like the Indexing service which searches your files and catalogs them to speed up searching...this is done while the computer is idle. The processes that belong to Indexing are named cidaemon.exe and cisvc.exe

You can disable this service safely if you want to (the XP help menu will tell you how).

Hope this helps,
Matt

24-05-2002, 10:05 PM

Do you have MS Office installed. If so you should disable FastFind.

JM

24-05-2002, 10:07 PM

There are alot of programs that do tasks when the PC is idle... The most common one i have found is that MS office indexing program, you can stop this by removing 'MS office' or something similar from the STARTUP menu option... Check everything in the STARTUP menu, you can drag the items to to desktop, then the next time you start windows and if it stall has disk access going for no reason you know it wasn't them and can then drag back to startup menu one at a time and see what happens next time windows starts..