Thinkpads Forum

Power Options Properties are set thusly:

-turn off monitor: after 5 minutes
-turn off hdd: never
-system standby: never
-system hibernates: blank (never used?)

After about 5 minutes... yes.. and screen blanks out as expected. But then about 10 minutes the hdd starts to behave as if there is a steady access to the hdd. What is going on? Is that normal? It doesn't make sense to have the hdd accessing; the hdd is being accessed with a steady rhythm.

Oh.. the XP screen saver is programmed to kick in after 3 minutes.

System: T30, 256meg ram, (2366-83u), XPpro SP2

Hmm... could be several things.

First, do you have a screensaver enabled? If so, is it set to start at 10 minutes of delay? If so, there's your problem.

Also, it could be something like an antivirus app doing a background scan after 10 minutes of inactivity.

I think my call was a false alarm. Sorry. What I did.. I decided to WAIT and see just how long the hdd activity would carry on before I interrupted it. I thought that maybe the activity had something to do with XPSP2 and Restore, or whatever. After about 10 more minutes, the hdd activity stopped. Therefore, this WAS most likely an XP-thing?

My guess is that it's a background antivirus scan, with that info...

there was no antivirus program installed at the time. infact, there were no additional programs with "background" processing installed at all.

This is normal behavior in Windows XP. If the system is idle for a certain amount of time, Windows will automatically do some optimizations of file placement on the hard drive... sort of a mini defragment.