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read and write data light stays on freezes up
My Inspiron 1525 is forever freezing temporarily while data is being written or read. Nothing happens until the light quits blinking. What is causing this and how do I stop it. It's particularly bad on the internet.
osprey4
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December 8th, 2009 15:00
Hi, geodav:
The first thing you need to do is rule out a bad drive. Excessive reads/writes may indicate bad sectors. Boot to the utility partition and run the Dell diagnostics on your drive.
If you see NO errors, the next thing to determine what program or process is responsible for all of this activity. For that, I recommend Process Explorer, for which I've included a link in my toolbox (link below).
geodav
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December 8th, 2009 18:00
Hi Osprey4,
I ran the Dell diagnostics and the drive is fine. I Ran Process Explorer, but the results meant nothing to me.
What am I looking for?
Thanks,
geodav
osprey4
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December 9th, 2009 06:00
When a prorgam or process is actively reading or writing to the hard drive, there should be a corresponding spike in CPU consumption. If you keep PE running in the background, then check it when you experience a slow-down, that might nail the culprit.
Two other ideas. First, Dell Datasafe is known for issues with excessive drive access. Are you running that? Second, check your hard drive is running in DMA mode, not PIO. This site has instructions for several operating systems, including Vista.