Hard disk high rate of access preventing browser use

R

rcc

I have an Advent desktop which is a few years old now running XP and Chrome. Internet access is fibre. For some time now I have had a problem with very high hard disk activity when connected to the internet which completely stops all use of the internet until the disk access stops. This happens every day at no particular time and the hard disk light can be on virtually non stop for up to 5 minutes and sometimes longer. This evening it has been on and off for almost three hours and simply trying to enter a login and password to an internet site can take half an hour......and then I get timed out. However, now there is virtually no disk activity whatsoever and I can write this. I have Avast on the computer and have an ISP firewall and filter switched on. Does this sound like an invasion of some sort or is it Xp doing something daft. Is there any way of looking at a log to see whats going on during the demented disk access? Any suggestions apart from buy a new computer would be appreciated. :)
 
1. does this happen in safe mode??

2. is indexing service disabled?

if it does not happen in safe mode then it is a 3rd party program, Chrome does not support xp, look in task manager or better yet download process explorer
as this is a better program.
 
Hi Elizabeth, have not tried starting is safe mode, will do that tomorrow. Indexing service is disabled Tonight I started up and the hard disk went at it again for a few minutes and now its all quiet, just the odd access every minute or so. Will download process explorer and see what that says.

I used to use internet explorer but switched to Chrome as I have google accounts and Chrome was the preferred browser. Think I should switch back?

Thanks for the input
 
no use IE only for microsoft updates if needed, I use firefox ESR which is only good till september 2017, not sure what I will use after that. :)
 
Tried starting in safe mode a few times and there was some disc activity with no input from me although it wasnt that long. Started windows up normally again and it went into lock down with disc access being so furious that everything on the screen froze and with only one request to open a website from me, it took 5 minutes before enough processor space was free to execute that request. Still not sure if this is internal or external. Will download process explorer as you suggest to see if I can narrow it down.
 
run process explorer in safe mode with networking, and disable all 3rd party programs, I would also uninstall chrome (for now)and install firefox 52 ESR and see if the problem still occurs, it might be chrome causing this since it no longer supports xp.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

also with process explorer it lets you search online for what the item is if you cannot identify the program that goes with that process, I have 23 processes running at this time and 3 of them are for my antivirus. :)
 
Thanks for that. Ive been an IE user since it first came out and reluctantly converted to Chrome about 2 years ago. Perhaps its time to give something else a try. Started the computer this morning and it went into access mode and locked me out for no less than 5 minutes. Its as though every bit on the machine was accessed. Now its all gone quiet again....for now.

Have downloaded PE and that is quite a complicated bit of software, not sure I will understand every aspect of it without reading up but it does show what the active processes are. What I did notice that there are times where the 500 or so MB of ram are completely maxed out on the graph. Will try Firefox to see what happens. have a good day. Roger
 
how much ram do you have?? if you have under 1gb you are not going to get much from xp as most programs and xp together need a lot more ram. I have 2gb on my pc at home and at work I have 1gb, I have an old dell with 512mb and I am getting ready to wipe it and try linux as 512 is not enough for me :)
 
Looks like I am going to be buying some ram!!! It makes sense that when this system is at least 8 years old and possibly more, any up to date program is going to require more ram than programs originally on the machine. Its a pentium 4 with 512MB and this is plainly not enough, so the hard disk access is probably the disk swapping things in and out of ram to achieve what the software is asking of the processor. At least your advice on process explorer did show this up clearly. Will put 2 or 4 gig on the machine and see what happens.
 
okey dokey, make sure that the ram you buy is compatible with your pc, and if you buy two sticks they must be identical, you cannot use two different sticks
 
rcc said:
Looks like I am going to be buying some ram!!! It makes sense that when this system is at least 8 years old and possibly more, any up to date program is going to require more ram than programs originally on the machine. Its a pentium 4 with 512MB and this is plainly not enough, so the hard disk access is probably the disk swapping things in and out of ram to achieve what the software is asking of the processor. At least your advice on process explorer did show this up clearly. Will put 2 or 4 gig on the machine and see what happens.
Click to expand...

Don't worry! If you manage to find the exact model you're looking for of RAM, it should work out. I use my 2013-era gaming PC to run XP, but if you need DDR2 RAM, I'd be happy to ship some. It came from an HP Pavilion 9000-something. I don't exactly remember but I picked it up from a friend of mine a week or so ago, took it apart. But the RAM is untested. My friend said his brother smashed the keyboard, and the RAM was found directly under the keyboard. Sadly it's only 512MB. I could still ship it.
 
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