Thinkpads Forum

I had been slacking with my lenovo updates and ran all of them a few days ago. Now, every time I do a cold start on my laptop my hard light is flickering for a sold 10-20 minutes after I get to the desktop and I don't know why. I did a search on the forums and came up with nothing. I've checked my antivirus, anti spyware, and other maintence settings and nothing is scheduled to run 'on boot' so to speak. any advice? has anyone else seen this?

thanks again, everyone!

Which operating system are you running?

gah, thought that was in my first post, sorry.

I'm running vista business, atm.

The most common cause for that is normal Vista hard drive indexing. Turn it off to see if the problem improves or goes away. Choose one of the following (3) methods to disable it (copied from 4sysops.com)

1) Navigate to Control Panel/System and Maintenance/Indexing Options. There you can remove all locations or only those you use rarely.
2) It is also possible to disable indexing for a certain drive or enable it only for selected folders. You can do this by changing the Properties of a drive or folder (right click on drive letter in Windows Explorer)
3.)The fasted way is to simply disable the Windows Search service. Run Services (just type “Services” at the Start Search bar), right click on the Windows Search service and select “Properties”. Then choose “Disabled” for the start type. Afterwards, you have to stop this service by right clicking on it and selecting “Stop”.

Last time I did this I chose option #3 and that worked fine.

Another thing that can cause a lot of seemingly unexplained disk access in Vista is Windows Defender doing a lot of scanning. I believe it comes set by default to run daily scans. You can change the scan schedule in the tools menu in Windows Defender.

I am betting on hard disk indexing. I have had three Vista laptops and they all do alot of hard drive activity for the first few hours. Just leave it on for a few hours and the hard drive will settle down.

It is normal!