Repeated Hard Drive Access w/ Wireless Connection Enabled

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Last night I installed a LinkSys Wireless G Broadband w/ Speed Booster router to work with a used PC I bought from a friend that already had the proper adapter PCI card installed.

Everything appears to work just fine - expect the the hard drive is accessed every two seconds and I'm concerned that the hard drive will wear out. When I disable the wireless adapter card (going back to wired connection), the hard drive access stops - only to resume again when I re-enable the adapter.

I did not get the software CD that may have come with the adapter card when I got the used PC and so, I'm unclear if there is an installation step that might be required for the adapter. Again, the wireless connection appears to work great when enabled.

Anyone have ideas as to a setting or something that I can check to stop the repeated and frequent hard drive access?

Thanks!
 
The hard drive will not wear out.

Since it is an old computer it might have too little RAM and it needs to access the swapfile to do background tasks. Try disabling some resident programs and see what happens. It may also be your firewall software writing logs or something similar.
 
The PC is a Dell Dimension 8100 with 768 MB RAM and an 40 Gig HD (about 1/2 full). Should this be enough RAM to avoid the issue you posit?

Would a firewall program log when the connection is wireless vs. when it is wired? Do firewalls programs have a setting or option where I can stop this? Should I try a different firewall program?

Why wouldn't the HD wear out? It is every 2 seconds! All my data resides thereon and I do not want to risk losing the drive and having to go to the trouble of installing a new one and recovering my data from backup CDs.

This seems a very peculiar situations to me.

Thanks for your help and thoughts.
 
Heh, plenty of RAM :)

The single hard drive access may last for some 20ms, which is 1/100 of the time. Your hard drive will not die from being 1% utlised, especially when many hard drives are busy 100% of the time from the second they are plugged in (and must still last through their warranty period)
 
DLoad and install StartupCPL...you can check in there exactly which programs are running in the background.
I suspect it might be your AV program or the Windows indexing service if you are running XP.
This can be safely turned off.

patio. :cool:
 
Thanks for the Suggestions re: Monitoring Software

Thanks for the suggestions - I will be using both Filemon and StartUpCPL this weekend to see if I can debug. I've downloaded both - now need to run them.
 
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