I previously blogged about my crazy Vista disk activity and had a few suggestions in the comments. Judging by the number of Google referrals I'm getting for "vista disk activity" and like, I'm guessing these are very common issues.

Since posting, I've actually had very little disk thrashing, and I'm wondering if it's related to the Compatibility and Performance packs I installed around the same time.

I came across this blog saying that turning off paging and prefetch solved his problem. Additionally, the comments in my blog suggest it could be the indexing service. It's worth giving this things a try if you're still having the same problems (after installing the above packs) and see how you get on. Let us know in a comment how you get on.

Every time I boot my Vista machine up, I hear my hard disks grinding for quite a while after the machine finishes booting and services finish starting up. I also find that if I leave my machine for a while, I'll come back to more hard disk thrashing. With noisy RAID Raptors, and a case made of mesh, it's not a particularly enjoyable sound!

Today I'd had enough, and decided to check on the web if anyone else is having this sort of behaviour. It seems many are. Lots of people are pointing at System Restore, so I fired up regedit to find it runs every 24 hours. This explains every day when I boot it up, the hard disk activity. I don't really want to turn this off, but maybe I could increase the frequency. After all, I'm not often doing anything that should upset the system!

This doesn't address the "idle" noise. I guarantee if I leave my machine for 5 minutes, Vista will begin doing something behind my back, and if I move the mouse, it'll stop within a few seconds. This isn't an accident - Vista is doing something when it thinks I'm not using the machine - but what?

Has anyone else seen this behaviour? Any ideas on what it could be, or how I could track it down? I'm more curious than annoyed - I just want to know what it is!!