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Tip #4479 - Stop Working So Hard

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Stop Working So Hard

If you're a Vista user, every once in awhile, you may notice that your hard drive is working extra hard for what seems like no reason. When that happens, it's likely that a background process has taken your hard drive hostage, forcing it to thrash loudly as it struggles to keep up with the high rate of reads and writes. Therefore, your computer responds slowly as the process overloads the physical limitations of your drive. What a mess! So, what are you supposed to do?

Well, the solution is rather simple, but it can be a little tricky at times. First, you need to identify and stop the process that is overworking your drive. There are two methods you can use to do just that. Let's check them out, shall we?!

Method #1

1.) To begin, click on the Start button and type "reliability" into the search box. Next, click on the Reliability and Performance Monitor shortcut.

2.) On the main screen of that, click on the Disk section down arrow to see a list of all the processes and files that are writing or reading from your drives.

3.) Next, click on the Read or Write headings to sort out all of the disk operations so that you can start to identify which process or file is currently using the disk the most.

Method #2

1.) First, visit Microsoft’s Sysinternals Web site here and download the Process Explorer.

2.) After you have started the Process Explorer, click on the View menu and choose Select Columns.

3.) Next, click on the Process Performance tab and checkmark the following:

a.) I/O Reads
b.) I/O Read Bytes
c.) I/O Writes
d.) I/O Write Bytes

4.) Hit OK.

5.) You will now see the new columns listed for each process. To identify which process is killing your hard drive, just look for the process with the highest number of Reads or Bytes.

That's all there is to it. Just choose which method you think will work best for you and then go to town!

~ Ramachandran Kumaraswami

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