Hard drive Constantly running

I just want to add that MSE Antimalware is what is the source of most of my HDD activity, it usually writes once a second to the HDD , I have read that this is in part due to the heuristic scanning technique it uses.

Any truth to this?

I also notice that the prefetch is writing/reading alot too. Normal?

karl:

I'm not bothered by it at all. I know MSE is very good and as far as I can tell it does very little to make a actual impact on the system resources, I also have MSE loaded on my ten year old HP pavilion 7955 Pent 4 1.5G with 1.25gigs of PC133 RAM. That machine has never run better since we bought it new and had various security suites on it like Norton which sucked the life out of it. CA wasn't much better and I caught a trojan while the PC was supposedly protected!

Just to clarify this PC HP Pavilion p6680t with the older Core i5 quad 2.8G and 6 gigs of RAM is lightening fast!

I guess what people are reacting to is the stark difference between how XP operated the HDD and how Win7 does.

As an aside I also think people are concerned that the constant read/write every second will wear out the HDD faster.

legacy7955 said:

As an aside I also think people are concerned that the constant read/write every second will wear out the HDD faster.

It's mostly writes and with write buffering, it's nil. I have a SSD and I'm not concerned with it. We'll all be looking at the bottom side of the grass by the time it will make a difference. :)

I would definitely check with resmon.exe, like a few others have mentioned. Since it's a fresh install, there is a chance the index service might be going crazy. Type in indexing options into that Start menu and see if it says Indexing complete or something that says Indexing is reduced due to user processes? I can't remember what the last bit will say. If it says that, then indexing service might be the cause.

Also, I should ask, has the hard drive been checked for crap and was fully reformatted before install.

Just finally stopped mine from running consistantly. A toolbar updater.exe file was reading and writing to the harddrive consistanlty. It was named vupdater under services. Stop running immediately after turning it off.

Here's a free tool for checking what's going on with files/folders.
At My Window