Hard drive noise when notebook is "idle"

[koster]

When my laptop computer has nothing to do, for example if it is sitting idle while I am reading a document, the hard drive starts making noises and the hard drive light blinks away. I'm talking about PDF files, so it's not the Autosave of Word.

The noise is very irritating, especially when there doesn't seem to be any reason for the hard drive to be doing anything at all. Is there a service or something like that I can disable to stop this?

It's an HP OmniBook XE3 notebook with Windows 98. If I open Task Manager, the noise ceases, when I close Task Manager, it starts again.

Any help appreciated!

[OBonio]

One of two things (or both) could be causing this. Swap file management or power saving. Swap file management is done by Windows so not much can be done about that. It will read and write to the swap as and when it deems it necessary. Power saving kicks in after a certain amount of time to conserve power on the laptop. One of these measure is to spin the hard drive down after a certain amount of time. Go to start, settings, Power and have a look there to change that setting.

[mikeyp]

Actually, you can reduce the size of the swap file windows uses, or turn it off all together. Not sure how to do it in 98 i'm afraid. But i'd imagine it'd be under control panel. Maybe in system? I'd have thought defragmenting your disk might help. Often background processes might read from the disk. If files are all over the place, this might be a loud process.

[calibrax]

This can be down to the swapfile... the only real solution to that is to increase your laptop's physical RAM.

I suspect however that your problem is down to the Indexing service - this indexes your hard drive in the background to make searches faster. If you disable it, then your search may take a few seconds longer, but when you aren't searching (i.e. 99.9% of the time) your PC will run a little faster.

[Thunderchild]

it is not advisable to disable the swap file.

[koster]

Thanks. How do I turn off the indexing service in Windows 98?

[calibrax]

To turn off indexing in Windows 98, click Start, Run, type msconfig, and press Enter. Look for an entry for FastFind, and uncheck it.

[koster]

When I open msconfig, I have the tabs General, Config.sys, Autoexec.bat, System.ini, Win.ini, and Startup. I can't see FastFind anywhere.