Hard drive continually being accessed

try disabling the indexing service as a starter!

Thanks for the advice. I had already disabled the indexing service to solve this problem. :( Any other advice would be helpful. I am currently going through the tedious task of disabling all services and adding them back in three at a time until I find the culprit. I will post the results.

Just so you know i have the exact same problem with a 5100. Its quite annoying and makes programing on these systems nearly impossible. I really really wish a fix could be made. This small noise approximately every 30 sec is enough to make you think your hard drive is about to crash and your about to lose your work and your job. Its quite unacceptable.

 

I just want to state, that I am faced with the same problem on my Inspiron 8000. Help is really appreciated! Hope to hear/read from a genie soon.

All right folks, I don't know if this will help you, but it sure helped me. I tracked my problem down to Sygate Personal Firewall. After playing around with the services for a while I decided to work backwards from activity listed in the task manager while the hard drive was being accessed. SMC.EXE traced back to sygate. I uninstalled the program and then went into the registry and really uninstalled the program. Since then my hard drive activity has severely dropped and my hard drives actually time out at the specified time. If you don't have Sygate installed, you might try the same method for tracking down the program.

Ken Carlson

I take it that sygate personal firewall (smc.exe) was something you installed and not something that has been packaged by Dell or Microsoft, because I have looked through my system and cant find that file. Any other ideas? So far this Dell 5100 is only good for a DVD player to me, quite a disappointment.

Senior Programmer