How can I tell if my pc is always 'working'

Ben:

Ben:

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As some of you may know I'm using a Dell dimension 9200 which i've recently reinstalled vista onto. (not formatted hard drive)
I've just been in my room, NOT using the pc for the last 30mins or so and its constantly making noise. Not the usual fan noise.
Possible the HD doing something...

Is there anyway to tell if its 'busy' doing something although I'm not using it?
Using taskmanager or something :\

Thanks for any advice.
 
It wouldn't be uncommon for some programs to detect idle periods and use it to run background tasks.

Defrag will, some anti virus apps will for example. You can use task manager to check, some Windows tasks will run under the svchost process so may not be obvious what it is.
 
I found Vista to constantly be running the search index when left unattended
 
Ctrl - Shift -Esc -> task manager
Show process from all users
then
Resource monitor.
You can see what is using the CPU, hard drive etc...

As posted elsewhere disabling the superfetch service really quietened down my disk thrashing...
 
If you're not activly using the PC then Vista will be running maintenance while the CPU cycles are idle.

e.g. indexing files/folders, defragmenting the harddrive, AVTK scanning etc...

If you're worried about something on your PC then install and run something like Search and Destroy to ensure you're spyware free.

There are other tools to see what your PC is up to ... monitoring programs and network usage to see what's doing what (e.g. Sysinternals' Process Explorer and NetLimiter)

http://www.sysinternals.com
http://www.netlimiter.com
 
Thanks for your help everyone. Sounds like it probably just doing background tasks.
 
I'd always recommend, msconfig to check for startup items and being ruthless in what you allow to auto start. Then run CCleaner to clean up temp files and registry. Follow that with a full Malwarebytes scan followed by a full AV scan. Finish up with Defraggler or a similar defrag application.

That was you have the peace of mind of knowing your system is clear of any nasties, your system is clear of any clutter and your drive is neatly organised to minimise the need for file searches and drive access.

Amazing how much faster and quieter a system can run, and especially idle, when you clean it up properly.
 
to be honest defrag isnt really worth the time it takes these days, with MS's auto defrag in the background and NTFS file systems.

i checked mine out of interest the other day, i havent manually defraged for a very long time and the analysis came back at 1% fragmented. so the automatic background processes do their job well.
 
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