re: Question about 'Stop Windows from Wildly Accessing your Hard Disk'
Tuesday, February 15, 2005 at 4:01 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Telmo Amaral
(1 messages posted)
Thanks a lot. I have a completely different laptop (Compaq Presario 700) but was
experiencing the same problem. Brief disk activity every second or so can be quite
distracting, when you're trying to focus on something else and just want the laptop
the stay switched on and silent... This model's hard-disk is very noisy. With me,
the cause was the free version of ZoneAlarm. Disabling the True Vector service and
shutting down ZoneAlarm, as you suggested, solved the problem. Guess I'll have to
do with the Windows (half of a) firewall...
T.
On Wednesday, August 27, 2003 at 7:38 pm, Eichinger wrote:
>
>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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