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April 29, 2005
Dear CNET members,
Happy Friday! I first want to thank many of you for voting for us on the Webby Awards site; this means a lot to us, and we appreciate your support. Come May 3, we'll find out who wins. The second thing I would like to announce is that we have redesigned the CNET forums for a leaner and cleaner presentation. We are still working out some kinks, so bear with us (yes, I know, the font is too small). Please check them out and let me know what you think. Now let's tackle Pitura's question about why his computer is busy at work, even when he's not.
Pitura, while the cause of your system being busy when your computer is not in use could be a variety of things, most of our community members' submissions say that it is very likely due to the Windows XP indexer hard at work. So without further delay, I give you this week's winning answer by Matti. While Matti's answer is only for the indexing cause, check out the honorable mentions and other suggestions from our members which include other possibilities. Hopefully these answers will help put your concerns to rest. Thank you, everyone, and have a great weekend!
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Member Question of the Week
I'm running a P4 2GHz PC Windows XP system with 256MB of RAM. Periodically while the system is not being used, I notice the hard drive light flashing and it sounds like some sort of intensive file read/write is going on. I open the Windows Task Manager Processes window to find out what is running, and the only service that is consuming the CPU is the system idle process, very high around 95 to 98 percent. Also, as soon as I open this window, the hard drive stops acting busy. I have Norton AntiVirus, Spybot, and the ZoneAlarm firewall installed and running, but these don't appear to be what's keeping my CPU busy. There are no open applications on my taskbar either. What else could it be?
Submitted by:
Pitura
What you are witnessing, if you have not scheduled any other background tasks to run while the system is idle, is the XP Indexer at work. The dead giveaway is the fact that your HDD stops the activity as soon as you start another activity. It kicks in periodically only when your processor is otherwise idle. The purpose of the Indexer is to speed up your file operations. If you have a large number of data files, say hundreds, having their location...
Submitted by:
Matti S.
For
Matti's efforts, we're sending him his choice
efforts, we're sending them their choice of any
Help.com Learning CD.
Community Buzz
 Each week we take a look at topics discussed in the forums.
Best regards and enjoy!
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More from the Mac OS forum
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Check out next week's question:
I'm a new user of Kazaa and am looking for some guidance. Is there any reasonable way to know when I'm downloading a file that it's legal and safe for me to download? I'd love to get some good peer-to-peer stuff, but I don't want to break the law or accidentally download any viruses. Thanks.
--Submitted by:
Gretchen G.
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