Win ME reuns HD constantly

[Bill Kinsey]

Something on my Win ME laptop is causing the hard drive to run nonstop when the machine is on but idle.  A simple cleck on the desktop will still the drive for a minute or so, but it soon cranks up again. A related problem may be that the disk check after a faulty reboot is very slow, and scandisk takes forever as it continually restarts with the message that the drive's contents have changed.

Clearly something is running that should not be -- as is confirmed by the system resource meter which spikes to 100% use of memory when the drive is running.  But what?

How do I identify this pest and quash it?

[Delboy]

Hi, if you think this is a nasty have you tried scanning with an AV, Adaware and Spybot s&d? If these come up clean try process explorer from www.sysinternals.com this should give the process a name.

Online scan:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Adaware:
www.majorgeeks.com

Spybot s&d:
www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

Derek.

[Flame]

Well, I know from personal experience how BAD Windows ME really is. In my opinion, Windows ME never should have been released, becuase it has a LOT of errors. (That's why I upgraded to XP). As for your problem with memory, have you checked for viruses and spyware lately? Also, who is your computer manufacturer?

[glb]Flame[/glb]

[merlin_2]

how can you condem the best o/s ever i have used winme for four years with hardly any problems of which were  linked to nav (now dumped?(:_:) <<childish reply> anway first of all is> your screensaver for one>>alter it to run fourteen mins that should ample.. ......type msconfig in the run box and click the strat-up folder now scroll down the list and untick the programs that will be loaded at start-up.......and defrag you mean....and use the disk-clean up program....to gain more diskspace dump themes 31mbs......

[Mandebvu]

Thanks Derek & Flame

Problem now solved but via an indirect route.  It may help others, so here's what I did.

First squeaky cleaned the laptop [Toshoba] with multiple AV, spy & anti-ad software.  Problem still persisted.  Then ran Process Explorer, which identified that some sort of indexing was going on complements of a file named mosearch.exe.  This turns out to be the MS Office search service.

A Google search on the file name took me to CastleCops, where I found:  "Mosearch.exe--Fast Search in Office XP - similar to the new revision of the Find Fast feature in Office 2000. Fast Search uses the Indexing Services in Office XP to create a catalog of Office files on your computer's hard disk. As with Find Fast - a waste of resources."

I couldn't agree more!

I have now disabled the function & the laptop no longer churns away all the time.

Yes, ME is flaky, but how can Microsoft build in something like this that not only wastes resources but also interferes so much with scandisk and defragging???

I'll start a new posting for my remaining WinME hassles.

[Delboy]

Hi, glad you've solved this problem

I use Windows ME as well, I have very few problems with it. (And no problems at all with Office 2000 and Fast Find; Fast Find was never installed )

Derek.

[Flame]

Nice job Mandebvu! I'm glad to see what this forum has had SOME influence on you!   We look forward to hearing from you again!

[glb]Flame[/glb]