Temporary Stall when Scanning Hard Drive?

Hey guys,
This has been happening to me for the many months I've had Win7-64.
I've just been too lazy to post it.

I'm not sure if this is some sort of power saving mode or a bug, perhaps you guys can clarify for me. And yes, I've checked the FAQs.

I have:
C:\ windows and programs
E:\ music and documents
F:\ TV shows
G:\ Active downloads
Each drive is an individual Seagate 7200.11 (or 7200.12).

It seems that when I'm in windows explorer and navigating through my drives, I seem to get a momentary system stall.
My programs will blank out (as if they crashed).
Music will stop playing as will videos, pretty much it's like my computer has been paused.
This lasts for anywhere from 3-10 seconds, then everything gets back to normal.
It seems especially bad when navigating through folders with a lot of files (60+).

This is something that has never happened in XP for me, and I don't remember if my Vista-64 was doing the same thing.
But it's definately happening with all my drives, so I'm pretty sure it's not just 1 drive on the verge of death.

It also does this with my programs.
If I have a program open (like firefox or msn messenger), but don't use it for an while 30 minutes or so, clicking back into it, it stalls, then I hear the hard drive spin for a bit, then everything goes back to normal.
Kind of like a certain part of the OS went into "sleep mode", was written to the hard drive, then needs to be retrieved before I can do anything with it.

I'm almost certain this isn't some sort of resource saving or adaptive performance feature.
But if so, I've been scratching my head on how to turn it off.
It just doesn't seem quite right to me that this is normal/acceptable behavior.

Also:
- I also defrag every week
- I'm malware/virus free

thanks everybody!

This could be because of your Anti-Virus software. If you have it set to real-time scanning every time you get into a folder with a lot of files the Anti-Virus software checks all the files and you experience a delay. I would check your AV software first. Then anything you have that is indexing files.

WindowsStar said:

This could be because of your Anti-Virus software. If you have it set to real-time scanning every time you get into a folder with a lot of files the Anti-Virus software checks all the files and you experience a delay. I would check your AV software first. Then anything you have that is indexing files.

To add to that, you might try having Windows index ALL your files (this will take a LONG time), to make it faster access in the future.

It seems to me that it is just taking forever to load.

~Lordbob

Would you provide some screen shots of your drive from Disk Management?

Edit: Drive Model would help too.