I bought myself a new laptop hard disk, same size as my old one (because it
seemed to be getting extremely loud in use and the new one is almost whisper
quiet). I decided to clone the old one by making an image of it and then
restoring the image onto the new one so win XP wasn't installed from afresh
on this new drive. Ever since, the hard disk activity light has been
constantly on. It doesn't even flicker but just stays on all the time. I
can't hear any disk activity apart from the occasional sound of what I can
only describe as the read head hitting something inside very rapidly in
succession and then stopping for a few minutes. Access to most of my apps
are as normal, but access to Outlook Express is extremely slow to startup. I
figured this might just be remedied with defragmentation of the disk which I
ran but the problem still persists. Any ideas?

XP by default turns file indexing on. You may have had that turned off on
the original disk. Until it indexes the whole disk (several hours), it will
continue to steal CPU cycles from whatever else you are doing. I hate
this--happened to me recently and I thought I had a virus. You can turn it
off by looking at properties of the disk--either from Windows Explorer or
from the Disk Management box.

"nil spam" <no@spamplease.com> wrote in message
news:bu9kqo$1kp8$1@uns-a.ucl.ac.uk...

new disks are louder and generaly faster

--
Dennis Savatski
"nil spam" <no@spamplease.com> wrote in message
news:bu9kqo$1kp8$1@uns-a.ucl.ac.uk...

"Joe Davis" <davisexpREMOVE@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:4O3Ob.12705$1e.465@newsread2.news.pas.earthli nk.net...
| XP by default turns file indexing on. You may have had that turned off on
| the original disk. Until it indexes the whole disk (several hours), it
will
| continue to steal CPU cycles from whatever else you are doing. I hate
| this--happened to me recently and I thought I had a virus. You can turn
it
| off by looking at properties of the disk--either from Windows Explorer or
| from the Disk Management box.
|
| "nil spam" <no@spamplease.com> wrote in message
| news:bu9kqo$1kp8$1@uns-a.ucl.ac.uk...
| > I bought myself a new laptop hard disk, same size as my old one (because
| it
| > seemed to be getting extremely loud in use and the new one is almost
| whisper
| > quiet). I decided to clone the old one by making an image of it and then
| > restoring the image onto the new one so win XP wasn't installed from
| afresh
| > on this new drive. Ever since, the hard disk activity light has been
| > constantly on. It doesn't even flicker but just stays on all the time. I
| > can't hear any disk activity apart from the occasional sound of what I
can
| > only describe as the read head hitting something inside very rapidly in
| > succession and then stopping for a few minutes. Access to most of my
apps
| > are as normal, but access to Outlook Express is extremely slow to
startup.
| I
| > figured this might just be remedied with defragmentation of the disk
which
| I
| > ran but the problem still persists. Any ideas?
| >
| >
|
|

Thanks Joe, that seems to be what happened - would've thought since I cloned
the whole disk from the old one to the new one this setting would have been
saved but it wasn't. Very weird!