Excessive Hard Drive running time

[tomartom]

I have an R40 1.4, 512 and 30 gig HD. I have noticesd that after downloading significant large updates in the past weeks (that were reccomended by the IBM interactive Software), that my Hard Drive seems to run quite a lot longer at start up probably all up around 2-3 minutes. It never did this before. Does anyone else have a similar problem, or is there a promlem pending?

Many thanks in advance

tony

[egibbs]

Defrag lately?

Ed Gibbs

[tomartom]

Yes I have defraged and debugged the hard drive

tony

[egibbs]

One thing to keep in mind is that WinXP keeps track of the files loaded at boot and tries to optimize their layout on the drive for faster loading. If youve updated files that Windows had optimized they may be de-optimized and it may take a while to get them back in place.

I believe the rule is that if the machine is idle for at least 5 minutes, it has been three days since the last optimization, and the machine has been rebooted snce the last optimization then it will kick in. Try rebooting it, logging in, and then letting it sit idle for a while. After 5 minutes or so you should see a lot of HDD activity begin, and it may run for quite a while. Just let it run, and when it's done you should see faster boots.

If you're still seeing lots of post-boot disk activity after that then you need to figure out what process is causing it. Use ctrl+alt+del to bring up the Task Manager and look at the process tab to see what processes are using the most CPU. CPU activity is not necessarily related to disk activity but it should give you a clue.

Ed Gibbs

[tomartom]

Thanks for that, that is what is happening. After a couple of subsquent reboots the H/D activity has dropped.

many thanks
tony