Windows Vista HD activity light constantly on

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Gawd
Joined
Feb 27, 2013
Messages
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I've got a Dell OptiPlex 330 with Vista Business installed and the HD activity light stay on constantly without anything installing,updating or anything for that matter.Happens everytime it boots.I had systems with Vista before and they all do the same thing with regards to the hard drive.I have the sidebar disabled along with any widgets.I'm booting directly from the hard drive in setup.It has a e8400 cpu with 2GB of DDR2 and a SATA 3.0 7200rpm hard drive.Any suggestions other than get rid of Vista:rolleyes: Only reason I'm using it is because that's the coa on the case and I have a re-install disk that came with it.
 
It could also be that since you only have 2GB of ram that your system is using the swap file on your hard drive alot to make up for the lack of ram.
 
It's caused by Superfetch, which caches commonly used files into memory to make the OS faster. Disabling it will lower system performance overall for the trade off of lower HDD utilization for a few minutes after boot. You can bring up task manager and look at the performance tab to see how much is cached. Cached memory will grow as free shrinks. The only tweak I suggest that you consider making is changing Superfetch from Automatic to Automatic (delayed) which will start the service a few minutes after boot rather than right away. In some cases this may help as it will stop the system from caching while it's still loading up start-up items.

Also, I suggest not disabling Indexing. Indexing is done during idle times (thus not hurting performance) and is used for faster file searching. For example, rather than clicking your mouse through all the menus to find something in Control Panel or a document, simply type the name into the search box on Start Menu.

Vista is a fine OS as long as you have SP1 and enough memory for it (2GB is enough).
 
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