Windows 7: system cpu/io usage

Something doesnt seem quite right with my system at the moment.

When idle even on fresh bootup with superfetch disabled the hdd light is flicking on and off and oso I checked resource monitor.

That shows a steady 15-50kB/sec writes ongoing for the system process.
Likewise in task manager 'system' is using 1-2% cpu usage steadily.

'system' seems a bit vague, is there a way to diagnose this more to narrow it down? or alternatively does anyone have a hunch what it may be.

thanks.

I'm scratching my head a bit here...but why on Earth would you disable SuperFetch?

In all probability it's just Windows 7 carrying out its indexing procedure.

I'm also puzzled as to why you've disabled SuperFetch when its sole purpose is to speed things up for you.

In Task Manager, select the Performance tab, and then push the Resource Monitor button to open a second window.

On the second window you'll now see tabs for OVERVIEW, CPU, MEMORY, DISK and NETWORK. If you select any of these, you'll get a complete DETAILS presentation of what processes are using what resources. You can resize/maximize the window and spread the columns for better visibility, so that you can see everything.

You can also click repeatedly on the various column headings, to sort the rows presented into ascending or descending sequence based on the data values in that column.

You should easily be able to see what's doing what... who's reading/writing to disk, who's using low-level CPU amounts continuously, who's using memory, etc.

dsperber yep I did that, the process is simply called system.

to the others superfetch is disabled for diagnostic reasons, its obviously harder to tell whats going on with i/o if I have superfetch running in the background. It has its advantages and disadvantages and I dont want this thread to be a superfetch one please. For the same reason windows search is also disabled.

superfetch is back on now I done diagnosing.

I disabled freenet6 and malwarebytes removed a suspicous file, since the reboot as far as cpu usage goes it looks back to normal, hovering 0-1% on bootup instead of 2-3% and with multiple IE, outlook, foobar, securecrt as well as few other apps loaded hovering between 0-3% whilst before with apps open I was nearly at 10%. hdd lght still flashing a lot but when I checked my spare rig that also has a flashing light although somewhat less regular. I checked with process monitor on the file activity and is lots of registry access, notably tcp settings been accessed in a loop and audio also looping.