msmpeng thrashing hdd when idle, also on a 2nd system hdd usage

HDD usages reduces life and uses power, its defenitly I dont want to see on my laptop. Am I right this is MSE, and why is it doing a scan everytime its idle? can I disable idle scanning?

scheduled scan is sunday 2am, today isnt sunday and its not 2am.

In addition if I run a quick scan its done in a minute, this hdd thrashing will go on for hours but then stops when I move the mouse pointer.

On my main desktop its more an annoyance than a big problem but I want to get the bottom of it.

My hdd light flickers roughly every second doing something, resource monitor shows the 'system' process. It does it even when no foreground apps opened at bootup.

Background apps are.

Logitech game profiler.
7 taskbar tweaker
nod32
pidgin
windows 7 firewall control
dumeter
proximitron

and usual system services

there is more background apps which I start after bootup but they excluded as it happens before I start them. My 2 chief suspects are du meter since I think it logs usage frequently and windows 7 firewall control which I believe polls the windows firewall log. If I hammer the windows key on this system so the menu comes on and off it generates hdd activity as if nothing is cached, my laptop doesnt do such a thing, this desktop has 16 gig of ram as well.

so 2 problems in one post.

For the msmpeng issue, try a clean boot via msconfig. If the issue goes away, it indicates a conflict with one of the programs/services you disabled.

As far as the desktop machine is concerned, how long has this HD activity been going on? You can open Resource Monitor to see what's being read/written to.

on the 2nd machine as I already said I already opened resource monitor and its the 'system' process.

I think I resolved the laptop, it turns out if a full scan is never been done MSE will keep trying to do one when its idle. After I did a full scan its now staying quiet when the screen is off.

Check in scheduled tasks
select "view hidden files"
Disable the scan of msmpeng in properties

Then you need to manually run a full scan of your PC using MSE...then the scheduled scan listed in scheduled tasks disappears.

I had this issue as well. It usually occurs when you update the client version of MSE.

chrysalis said:

on the 2nd machine as I already said I already opened resource monitor and its the 'system' process.

No, I meant use Resource Monitor to see which files are being read from/written to. Seeing which files are being accessed may give a clue as to what's doing it.

ok the top 2 files which add up to roughly the system process are.

c:\$logfile (ntfs volume log)
c:\$extend\$usnjrnl:$j

thee is about 10 other files accessed under the system PID as well but those top 2 files account for 95% of the i/o rate.

Might be useful to post a screen shot of more than just those two active files. Those are just NTFS metadata files. They will almost always be listed when there is disk activity. If all you see is just those two in the list it's usually not even enough to light the LED (cached, I guess?).

Make sure all columns are added to your screenshot.

pic

Although it appears DUmeter is responsible for most of the activity, the overall list doesn't seem to be enough to even illuminate the access LED. What happens when you disable DUmeter?