Constant hard drive activity?

BigRed80 said:

Hi all,

I just received a brand new company laptop, a Dell E6220 with Win 7 Enterprise x64, and I am experiencing the same constant hard drive access that has been described here. Every second or two, there is some kind of access.

I installed Process Monitor from Sysinternals and noticed, that two files keep getting accessed over and over again:
1. disk.inf_loc (blue)
2. disk.PNF (red)

What I find very strange is that svchost tries to "create" those files again and again.

Is anybody else experiencing the same thing? Any ideas on how to turn this off? Its driving me nuts :)

Thanks and cheers

BigRed

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1280/96256672.jpg

Have you uninstalled all factory bloatware using PC Decrapifier? Here is the download link and remember, delete as many of the programs as you can (except any of the .net framework or visual c++):PC Decrapifier - Download.com

I once had a similar problem with a brand new Dell laptop. It turned out that it was some error with the EULA that caused the computer to acquire file handles, approx 2 per second. Apparently it tried to write some files, but didn't succeed. I posted about this somewhere then, but cannot find it now.

But open Task Manager and check if the number of handles constantly grows. That could indicate that you have this (or similar) problem.

BigRed80 said:

Thanks for the info, that pretty much sounds like what I am experiencing.
When you had this problem back then, did you post about it on here? Or was ist somewhere else? Were you able to fix it?
Thanks

I posted about it somewhere, probably on the Dell forum but I cannot find that now. It was an XP-machine, a Dell Vostro 1510. What I did was I entirely replaced XP on the machine, since I couldn't find any way of removing the faulty EULA.

So, if you are seeing this on a machine with the original Dell install, maybe re-installing the OS will fix it. But then... I've never managed to install W7 from a non-Dell DVD on my Precision M4400. There is something on the install DVD that came with the machine that is required for W7 to run well. I have not been able to figure out exactly what, though.