Reducing disk activity on a laptop

[Shorthair]

On my laptop, I have an XP install that likes to do trivial disk IO every few minutes. Most of this activity, as seen on filemon, is concentrated on the same files. None of this is swap activity--it's mostly things like explorer doing QUERY_INFORMATION against the root directory every sixty seconds. Even though the activity is quite trivial and doesn't involve much data transfer, much of it goes straight through the system disk cache to the HDD. As a result the HDD can never spin down. Even if I set the spindown timeout to one minute, the HDD will need to spin back up almost as soon as it spins down.

Are there any known hacks to force XP to trap as much disk activity as possible in the system cache, until it must hit the physical disk for something that isn't cached or when it has a healthy stack of writes pending?

EWF is close to what I'm looking for, at least as far as capturing writes is concerned, but it doesn't seem to have any way to periodically commit volume changes. I don't want to make my disk static: I just want to hold changes back so everything gets written out every 15mins, or after a few MB of changes, but not more frequently.

[LLXX]

Can you "calm down" the system by shutting off unused services?

Also look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ where you can adjust the settings of the memory manager. Details at

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware...nxptweak/3.html

This heavy disk activity is something I've noticed is specific to the NT-series of OSs, since I have 2K/XP/98SE tripleboot, and the XP/2K tend to do as you've said when it's idle, while the 98SE just sits with no disk activity at all when idle.

Edited April 2, 2006 by LLXX

[hj_fr]

/!\ Spin down/up a HDD every time is not good for it. It uses it prematurely...

[Andromeda43]

Take a look at the Registry tweaks on My Webpage

Also, as has been eluded to, you need to greatly minimize the number of TSR's and Services that you have running. For a laptop, that's critical.

That little HD generates a lot of heat and you definitely need to get it to just RELAX as much as possible.

I've posted a list of possible services to shut down on my Website too.

Also maxing out the RAM on that little beastie is paramount to good operation.

I have real good luck, getting more performance out of laptops, while minimizing HD usage.

It's sort of what I do for a living.

Blessings,

Andromeda

Afterthought:

You should NEVER run a resource hog like Norton or even McAfee on a little machine like that.

A lightweight AV program like AVG FREE would do you well.

Also, run several Anti-Spyware scans to make sure your PC is FREE of Spyware.

See my list of selected programs on My Webpage

Edited April 2, 2006 by Andromeda43