Stopping constant hard disk activity  Aug. 24. 2003
I bought 2 IBM ThinkPad R40 laptops (1.3 ghz Pentium M), 768 RAM, 40 gb disk, XP 
pro.   After loading software I noticed disk access about once per second for hours 
with any computer activity.  Seems to me that this will waste battery power and add 
many extra hours to disk wear.  Tried everything on this discussion.  Called IBM. 
 They were helpful but progress was slow – no improvement after two calls.  I found 
free utilities to help me solve the problem.  This problem is tricky and probably 
different on every computer.  I found 3 programs that continually access disk.  Zone 
Alarm Pro4, IBM Messages and Consumer Norton Anti Virus.  Zone Alarm Pro installs 
a service "True Vector Internet Monitor" in the services tab of msconfig program
this program runs a process vsmon.exe.  Stopping Zone Alarm leaves this process running. 
 To solve this problem,  Un-check "True Vector Internet Monitor" in the services 
tab.  Now when Zone alarm Pro starts the vsmon.exe process is subordinate to Zone 
Alarm and stopping Zone Alarm then stops vsmon.exe.

Turning off ibmmessages.exe in the start tab of msconfig causes some blue screens 
at shutdown. To stop the ibmmessages.exe disk access right click on its icon in the 
task bar and choose exit.  The Icon will return on next boot up.   I need to revisit 
this one.

To stop Norton Anti Virus (consumer) right click and stop program.
These problems were diagnosed with free utilities from SysInternals.com
Filemon.exe and Procexp.exe.  Filemon allows you to see what programs are driving 
the file access.
Procexp.exe shows hierarchy of processes a huge advantage over task monitor.  It 
allowed me to see why stopping Zone Alarm didn’t kill vsmon.
Diskmon.exe was also used but didn't help.    Once I stopped these three problems 
the disk access stopped for 3 minutes allowing the disk to be shutdown.  I am not 
an expert so I can’t guarantee this is a perfect fix.  Good luck.  Shame on programmers 
that create this type of code, especially when it will be run on a laptop.   Also 
corporate version of Norton Anti-Virus doesn’t constantly access the disk like the 
consumer version.

Unfortunately if the laptop is being used for internet  access you probably shouldn’t 
turn off Zone Alarm and Norton.  Now I have set the computers to sleep after 2 hours 
on AC power to save wear and tear on tear disk when they are left on all the time.

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