Solved HD light flashes for what reason when idle?

[jd50ae]

Do not want to come across as a complete idiot, but........
PC is idle, no software active.
That little blue light will at times stay solid or it flashes constantly.
Task manager shows nothing running.

Is there any way I can see what is going on?

Not paranoid, just real curious.

 

[fseal]

Well it could be a lot of things...

AV software scans while idle.

Windows indexing checks/scans when idle.

If you have auto updates enabled they may DL updates while idle.

Backup software will do it's work when the computer is idle.

And any number of other things that, for the same reason, need to perform background tasks but don;t want to interrupt you when you are actively using the computer.

You may be able to find out what it is using the windows resource monitor on the "Disk" tab.

[Edit]
Also log files, disk maintenance, page file maintenance, Microsoft office programs (like onenote, even if not open), some mail programs will check for the existence of mail periodically even when not open etc... the list is really endless [/edit]

 

[jd50ae]

I should have known.......

 

[fseal]

Hehe, you can see some of the culprits if you right click the task bar and bring up the task manager, then go to the Performance tab and click the Resource Monitor button, then click the Disk tab. It will list all the programs currently reading and writing to the disk . Even at idle there'll ususaly be several entries.

 

[gigagiggles]

In my case, System had the active CPU usage while the HD LED was lit. It did not slow down or stop coming out of idle when the mouse was used. After looking at the disk activity log while it was happening, it seemed the PC went scanning through the external hard drives. Of course, it might have already scanned the c: drive before I noticed.

While I do not rule out completely Norton, I do have many of its options to scan turned off. And one would think it would take pride and identify itself when it is doing the scanning.

That leaves Microsoft. Defrag is turned off. Indexing is turned off. No internet connectivity. As the OP offered, real curious.

 

[pawprint]

While I do not rule out completely Norton, I do have many of its options to scan turned off. And one would think it would take pride and identify itself when it is doing the scanning.

That leaves Microsoft. Defrag is turned off. Indexing is turned off. No internet connectivity. As the OP offered, real curious.

I have caught MS Security Essentials scanning on multiple occasions when I have disabled all idle/scheduled scanning. It was keeping me up at night with all the racket, until I finally gave Security Essentials the boot! :huh: