Topic: I Humbly Ask a Question; D:drive
started by: forumwhore
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 05 2002,04:25
D:drive has Photoshop on it and sometimes I load a game on it. I don't use it hardly ever.Why is it spinning for 45 minutes now?
Why does that make me uneasy?
I don't run any scheduled maintainence on it.
Posted by humanoid on Jul. 05 2002,04:51
is yur d: the cd/dvd drive or a harddrive partition? 
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 05 2002,04:55
It's the C:drive from my old computer.I erased a lot of stuff on it.
It sounds different from the new C:drive.
I can't imagine why it would spin for so long.
Is the XP firewall any good?
Posted by humanoid on Jul. 05 2002,04:59
i dunno.hardware compatability issues maybe.
XP has alot of that.
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 05 2002,05:07
Well, does it bother you when a HDD spins for a long time and you don't know why?does me.
Posted by humanoid on Jul. 05 2002,05:12
yeah, i had one harddrive and it spun for a long time.i just left the computer off for 2-3 days.worked fine then.
i dunno about two harddrives when one works and the other does that.
Posted by Wiley on Jul. 05 2002,05:51
K, the D: drive may be where your paging file is.Go to the control panel, select System and select the Advanced option. Then click the Settings button under performance and then select the Advanced tab. At the bottom you will see where you can change what disk is used to scratch on. Photoshop also has a place under Preferences where you can select where the program will write scratch data. Also, is the D: drive slaved off of the C: drive, the master on the secondary IDE, or slaved off the CDROM?
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 05 2002,05:51
I can't leave the computer off more than 2-4 hours when I'm awake.I could undo the ribbon cable though.
Posted by humanoid on Jul. 05 2002,06:33
yeah, same here.that's why i left that computer off and went to another.
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 05 2002,06:40
Your writing slut has only the one.bah.
Posted by ^Oni^ on Jul. 05 2002,14:55
When the controller on the drive itself starts to get flakey, sometimes drives will just spin and spin and spin for no apparent reason. Especially after a simple action like opening "My Computer" which accesses only the FAT and early sectors of the drive but gives it instructions to carry out.Hard drives notoriously do strange things as they age. Much like people.
Posted by WillyPete on Jul. 05 2002,16:51
If you can post a copy of your processes page (CTRL ALT DEL - 2nd tab) then we could have a look to see if you got something odd running.Best bet is to keep tabs on your autoexec, config files and the RUN/RUN ONCE/RUN SERVICES area of your registry
Posted by RadioActive on Jul. 05 2002,19:36
<Arafelis> Er, can anyone help me get rid of a virus? <Arafelis> I sort of need to before it takes out my computer.
<Arafelis> It's creating a junk file called WIN386.swp
Posted by WillyPete on Jul. 06 2002,00:43
Haw!You mock, but 2 days ago, our tech who's always moaning about how our desktop team create shit images, went and set C:'s swap file to 0 before setting one on D: Win2k(helps performance, even more so if it's on another physical drive)
Kerplunk.
No virtual mem at all.
Anyways, I sussed it for him, but if you guys ever (god forbid) have the same issue, restart using safe mode command prompt.
Browse to c:\winnt\system32 and do a dir to check the names of the .CPL files. They're the control panel ones.
They run in the dos safe mode for win2k.
Run the sysdm.cpl and you got your system properties page page.
Set a swap and you're off.
Fun exercise. Humbled him for a while.
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 06 2002,03:06
Lesse, D:drive is slaved to C:drive, and I just remembered after reading you guys that I moved the swp file there a long time ago (D).Am I incorrect in stating that the swp file is only used when the computer runs low on RAM?
Posted by Wiley on Jul. 06 2002,03:13
Speaking of fun with .cpl files try this little bit of joy.When at the home of your wifes close girlfriend, place a disturbing picture as the desktop wallpaper (I used a picture of a girl sucking off a horse) and delete the desk.cpl file. Then watch the drama unfold as they can't change the desktop picture. I'm telling you it hours of fun. ...until the wife turns on you.
Posted by Wiley on Jul. 06 2002,03:15
| Quote (forumwhore @ 05 July 2002,19:06) |
| Am I incorrect in stating that the swp file is only used when the computer runs low on RAM? |
What kind of utopian world do you live in?
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 06 2002,03:36
One where no one is bothered that I'm a tard.One where the girl in my 'tar will come and sit on my lap... someday...
One where my freaking email works for more than 2 months at a time.
Posted by Bob_the_Cannibal on Jul. 06 2002,10:25
technical explanation: Virtual memory is temporary HDD space that is used like RAM. it is slower than physical memory, however. Items in memory are "swapped" into it when you run low on RAM, or, when items in memory are not needed for a while. (hence the name "swap file"...)
The reason we have virtual mem, is because we haven't got enough ram for heavy tasks, like photoshop, Half-life, Quake 3, TMPGENC, VirtualDub, and other tasks, which require heavy amounts of storage space. This is why your disk "thrashes" when you are loading the memory too much.
IE: you start TMPGENC, and recode an AVI to mpeg. while that's running, you start up a game of Half-Life, and start rendering that 20 trillion poly/frame, 120FPS extra hi-res, hour long MAX file you've been working on...
this is, of couurse, not possible. you'd run out of CPU power if you started that MAX file... just the render alone would cause your virtual memory to be flooded. you'd need gigabytes (not singular) to process the scene effectively.
this is why we have swap files. so that boneheads can do large operations, with just a time and performance hit, and making their computer all but unusable until they're done...
in reality, you aren't doing any of that, are you? get more ram. this should alleviate some swap problems. otherwise, it might be your controller...
(Insert BOFH solution here)
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 06 2002,18:51
I've 512 mb RAM.I rarely do any photo work that would need more space, my file sizes are small for the 'net.
Thankyou, though
Posted by RadioActive on Jul. 06 2002,20:15
swap files are not as much about the amount of ram you have. if your ram is not enough for the OS to run properly then your swap files would be accessed more, but that's not always the case. even if only half of your ram is taken, wnidows will still use swap files. usually the stuff that needs to be in the memory but is not often used or hasn't been often used is transfered to swap file since it's not needed immediately. all operatung systems do that to a certain extent, some less so some more so. even if you are not using any memory intensive applications, often your swap file will still be read. not much you can do about this. it's also noticable when your computer is on 24/7 and you sleep not to far from it. hard drives hardly ever stop spinning.
Posted by BlackFlag on Jul. 06 2002,22:18
#1 HDs spin constantly. sometimes when they get old, they make noise while not even accessing. if that's the case, get a new drive asap.#2 if your HD is actually constantly accessing..... defrag, set a static swap file size, get rid of all the TSR's you possibly can.
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 06 2002,22:21
Thanx, guys, I always put the puter to sleep when not in use just to keep the mileage off the HDD...
Posted by CaptainEO on Jul. 09 2002,11:11
A few comments...By "spinning all the time" do you mean the drive is just powered up / platters spinning, or that it is actually reading/writing data?
IMHO it is better to keep a drive powered up constantly than powering it on and off. Less wear and tear that way. (exception: laptop drives, where saving battery power is more important)
If the drive is constantly reading/writing... Try looking in the Windows Process Manager to see what's doing the I/O. (if you really want to know precisely what's happening, look on Google for a program called "NT Filemon"). I should warn you that a similar thing happened to my mom's computer recently, and it turned out the disk activity was a Klez virus deleting all of her files :O !
Posted by ^Oni^ on Jul. 10 2002,14:18
Heh. Klez is a bugger. Symantec's removal tool is about 50% effective. Other than that, bleah. Won't leave. The only worse one out at the moment that I have seen alot of is w32/Loveletter.gen. Converts your mp3s, jpgs, etc to .vbs files and royally fucks up windows. 
Posted by forumwhore on Jul. 11 2002,02:20
Klez can lick my hairy butt. Last month I was getting it several times a day.Norton sure jumps on though.
I like that it scans the outgoing email so I'm not spreading it.
Posted by ^Oni^ on Jul. 11 2002,13:37
If Norton is catching it in your inbound mail, then you never caught it which means you can't spread it. And that's a good thing. It scans your system's address books, cookies, offline content, etc looking for email addys. It compiles a list of them, sends itself out via a small winsock app to all of those emails and then chooses one at random to be the "From:" addy. Interesting piece of writing, but pain in the ass once it's in there.
Posted by demonk on Jul. 11 2002,23:57
| Quote (Wiley @ 05 July 2002,19:13) |
| Speaking of fun with .cpl files try this little bit of joy. When at the home of your wifes close girlfriend, place a disturbing picture as the desktop wallpaper (I used a picture of a girl sucking off a horse) and delete the desk.cpl file. Then watch the drama unfold as they can't change the desktop picture. I'm telling you it hours of fun. ...until the wife turns on you. |
I just wanted to tell you that you have given me a very nice, very evil new weapon in my war on sanity. I"m referring to the sanity of my friends, not mine. That went bye bye a decade ago. Thank you. Now to go cause on particular person some headaches <insert Dr Evil laughter here>
Posted by Beldurin on Jul. 12 2002,05:07
yeah, klez is a little bitch since it has its own SMTP engine...Quick tip, turn off the preview window in your email proggy (outlook, outlook express, eudora, calypso, etc). That's how virii of that type auto execute.