I am working on my grand daughters Dell Inspiron 1420 with Vista. I am trying to figure out why the hard drive light keeps flickering 6 .5 minutes at boot. Everything seems to load on the desk top and in the task bar in about 2.5 minutes. The hour glass goes away but the hd light keeps going. How can I find out what keeps accessing the hard drive?
Hi WilliamP You could run Task Manager as soon as possible after boot (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and see what processes are tapping CPU - that might give you a pointer to what that disk activity is all about. You could also try PE, which is another, but more comprehensive, TM type tool. Process Monitor should give you very good, and more direct, data about disk activity - tutorial here. philby
Its the windows prefetch preloading stuff and windows search indexing files, its perfectly normal to take that long if the computer has less than 4gb of memory.
Agreed, it is likely prefetch still running. Process Monitor as mentioned is also a good way to verify that if you want to explore things in more detail.
