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#1
Sporadic hard drive intensely busy, apps stop responding
I'm not sure what started to cause this. My computer was working perfectly fine up until this week.
HP dv6 Pavillion laptop, 500gb with 40% free, Windows 7 with latest updates, 4Gb RAM.
The symptom is this: All of the sudden, applications start throwing the "not responding" state. I check my hard drive light and see it's on non-stop (no flicker). When I listen to the laptop, I hear the hard drive in a "loop" of click sounds. A bunch of rapid clicks for about 2 seconds that ends in a "double-click" sound, a pause, then repeats. It just keeps going. If I close down Outlook and a bunch of other applications, and wait, the pattern eventually stops and my laptop is functioning normally again.
I've run a disk defragmenter program and overall my drive showed to be in good shape. I also ran a disk surface detector and didn't find anything wrong, no bad sectors.
At first I thought Outlook might have been the culprit, but I've seen it trigger when something else is running, like Event Viewer.
So my question is... is my laptop suffering from a "partial" hardware issue? Or is it a software problem? I managed to get the task manager running when the busy hard drive issue popped up, to see what program was taxing the CPU, and... nothing. I couldn't get the Resource Monitor open, because it was just too damned busy.
My Event Viewer had a clutter of messages... but the only thing I saw peculiar were strings of about 15~20 "Bonjour Service" errors. I cleared everything out to start fresh and once this happens again, I'll note the time and see if there are any event entries that coincide that might shed some light.
Meanwhile, any ideas?