Windows 7: Excessive HDD activity

This might have already been discussed but I'm desperate. Starting a week ago my Windows 7 desktop with a fresh build started to have excessive and constant HDD activity. The task manager and process monitor shows nothing strange. But the performance is terrible. I've tried...



-Killing all processes and services
-Stopping indexing
-Stopping any antivirus and malware (after a successful scan)
-uninstalling most all apps
-hardware diagnosis (clean)

Nothing worked. Here's the rub... When I run HDDscan to deep scan the drive for performance and problems, the machine goes quiet and performs 100%! I've noticed that when it's busy uninstalling or running a scan it's back to normal.

What the heck?!?!

Hello & Welcome to SevenForums!

Is your Windows 7 making a Restore Point, Updating etc?
Try also to disable your anti-virus, just to see if something is happening.
An idea, could be to type msconfig.exe, go to the startup-tab and see what is starting up when Windows 7 is starting. Un-usefull applications, software etc should be ticked as off.
You could do this in CCleaner also.

Startup Programs - Change

Best Regards,
FredeGail

Thank you for the reply. Unofrtunately I've checked and done all of that. No antivirus, no restore point and disabled all of the msconfig junk.

May I ask what disk you have trouble with?
Model number etc.

Best Regards,
FredeGail

I have two 1Tb drives that are fairly new. I think they're both Seagate 7200rpm.

This is killing me!

You should be able to do a disk check right here

| Seagate

Best Regards,
FredeGail

Start Task Manager, click View, and then Select Columns. Check the I/O Write Bytes, and I/O read Bytes. and watch, maybe this will help you find what is munching disk I/O...

I've done this and found high I/O for a couple processes. I've killed them and even uninstalled at times with no affect.