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ChesteerCarnot
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December 30th, 2006 03:00
Hard drive activity on D E521
I recently bought a Dimension E521 running Windows Media Center. I've noticed that the indicator lights show the hard drive is making brief reads every second. The drive activity light flickers on and off constantly even when I have no program activity or internet activity.
I've never seen a computer drive do this. I'm wondering why it would do this? It seems like a waste of system resources if there isn't some good reason. Also I'm concerned it degrades performance or drive life.
Anybody have any ideas?
Chester
I (and several other over the last several years as evidenced by a forum search here) have asked the same question. This also affects a Dell C521 I just bought. It does not affect all Dell XP products, though, because a 1.5 year old Dell Laptop does not have this symptom. The forum search shows this affecting both Dell desktop and laptops, running some form of XP (and even some back in the Win2000 days) and with various Dell add-on pre-installs. No follow ups to most of the posts, so the exact culpit(s) have never been publically identified.
Here is my post of a few days ago:
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_harddrive&message.id=122113
I, like other posters, assume it is an combination of some XP setting and/or the pre-installs. Any detectives out there? We might have to wait until colleges get back in session, and a large customer base read these posts. Maybe several of them have found what features to enable/disable and what pre-install do delete to rid us of this excessive wear-and-tear on our hard drive.Flyter wrote:
>Mine does the same thing. In fact I never had one that didn't.> I would say this is normal but have no idea why.This is definitely NOT normal. This type of constant period access every second, along with improper hard drive cooling, are two to the top reasons why hard drive companies keep reducing their warranty periods.I can understand a long bust of background activity every hour or even every 30 or 15 or 5 minutes, depending on how often you like for things to be monitored or backed up, but when there background activity every second means something is seriously wrong.Flytyer06076
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Posted December 30th, 2006 19:00
Message Edited by Flytyer06076 on 02-11-2007 07:30 PMryannel2001
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Posted December 31st, 2006 15:00
My Dimension E521 also blinks every second or though. I never really noticed it because I thought it was supposed to do that. I think it's just part of certain systems because my old HP laptop does the same thing. However, my mom's Dimension 4700 does not do this. O well, as long as it doesn't die it does not bother me.Flytyer06076
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Posted December 31st, 2006 18:00
Message Edited by Flytyer06076 on 02-11-2007 09:41 PMChesteerCarnot
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Posted December 31st, 2006 19:00
Looking for the reason for my hyper-active drive, I noticed something else. When I open Windows Task Manager, click on Processes tab, and select any of the files in the window, the blue highlight bar blinks or flickers synchronously with the blink of my drive light. Evidently the window refresh is receiving the same signal as the drive.Since these are all executable system files, does this indicate one of them might be the problem?ChesteerCarnot
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Posted January 11th, 2007 19:00
No. I've had correspondence with tech support. On their advice I restored my system to the factory configuration image they have on a hidden partition. That should be the way it came right out of the box, but the hard drive was cycling just the same.The latest ideas is that the one second cycling on the hard drive is caused either by too little memory or malware. Since my PC has 1 GB memory that's not it. So I downloaded Spybot. It found 17 spyware links in my IE cookies even with just a couple of days of surfing while using the full Symantec package that came operational on my computer.I think, as someone suggested, that the malware is in the trial software and services they install on the computers. What I'd like to do is hear form someone who uncrates a new E521 and plugs it in for the first time. I didn't pay close attention until after I'd added and deleted some software. I'll bet some othe E521s are doing it from the very beginning.ryannel2001
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Posted January 18th, 2007 21:00
@FukenGruven wrote:
I'll be getting mine in a few days, I'll let you know.-Dell E521-AMD X2 64 4200+-20" WD-1 GB Dual DDR2-16x DVD-16x DVD/RW-256 MB ATI X1300 Pro-SB Audigy-Floppy-Dual TV Tuner + remote (Anyone know what the brand of factory installed tuner is?)-Logi x550 5.1-Logi EX110
Man that is an awesome computer! Not to be nosy or anything, but what did you pay for that?
Flytyer06076
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Posted December 30th, 2006 12:00
Message Edited by Flytyer06076 on 02-11-2007 07:29 PM