jxharding
asked on
hard drive starts working by itself when pc is not used.
i dont have a 98 pc currently, but someone asked me this:
when his pc is not used, his hard drive
starts working , all by itself.
the red light is flashing, you hear it working, its surely doing something
is there a specific microsoft program that is known to do this
or could it be anything?
apparently he does not have too many programs installed,
other than win 98 itself.
how do i switch this stuff off?
when his pc is not used, his hard drive
starts working , all by itself.
the red light is flashing, you hear it working, its surely doing something
is there a specific microsoft program that is known to do this
or could it be anything?
apparently he does not have too many programs installed,
other than win 98 itself.
how do i switch this stuff off?
Hi,
Some things t check:
- Is there an Ms-Office version installed? If so, big chance an indexing progam (findfast.exe) is running in the background. This thing is started from the "start up" folder in the start menu. Delete it from there and it shouldn't be started automatically again.
- Check your taskscheduler. Often this thing can be accessed from the icontray. Open it and check if any program like Defragmenter or Scandisk (or commercial equivalents of 'em) are scheduled.
- And like ADSaunders said, check an eventually present virusscanner.
Kind regards
Some things t check:
- Is there an Ms-Office version installed? If so, big chance an indexing progam (findfast.exe) is running in the background. This thing is started from the "start up" folder in the start menu. Delete it from there and it shouldn't be started automatically again.
- Check your taskscheduler. Often this thing can be accessed from the icontray. Open it and check if any program like Defragmenter or Scandisk (or commercial equivalents of 'em) are scheduled.
- And like ADSaunders said, check an eventually present virusscanner.
Kind regards
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also look on the task bar, put the mouse pointer over the icons on the mouse and if you see a message saying scheduled tasks, double click this and look at what tasks have been setup to automataclly. and stop them if you feel you'd like to, like scan disks etc.
H
H
Another possible reason is Windows re-sizing its paging file (also called the swap file, Win386.swp) when the computer is not busy.
Could be any number of reasons, some innocent some not. Here are a few:
..Lazy write cache (is this available in 98?) writing buffers to disk
..Anti Virus doing an idle system scan
I'm sure others will add to this list.
Ones to watch out for are possible trojans/spyware which could be trying to 'contact base' etc.
Cheers! .. Alan