hard drive will not turn off, help please

May never stop reading and writing to the hard for a hour so I wouldn't expect the drive to ever sleep. That may have worked in 2001 but not today.
Bob

There's just not enough information regarding your initial issue to accurately diagnose what's going on. Based on what you have said alone, it could be any number of things going on. Please give us more insight on your issue, what you're doing, why you're doing it, any major system changes or whatnot that have taken place that you remember in the last couple days.

Right off hand without knowing more about it, I would GUESS that your hard drive isn't kicking off could be a sign low virtual memory. How this works is the less virtual memory you have available the more your drive swaps files back and forth between physical memory and virtual memory, essentially never shutting the drive off. That COULD BE one explanation, however, again, not enough information in your original posting to accurately troubleshoot the issue.

Thank you for your reply. I have been told not to shut the computer off. So what i have done is set the hard drive to shut down after an hour of not using the computer or when i retire for the evening, while leaving the computer on. Just trying to save energy. There have been no major system changes in the latest while, save that i have installed more ram.

Aazyk

I had a somewhat similar experience with the hard drive seeming to always be working. I had plenty of ram on a machine that was only a few months old. Nothing seemed amiss there.

So I began shutting down programs that were loaded at startup... one by one and slowly observing any response. Then I began shutting down programs running in the lower tray... again one by one and carefully observing how the hard drive activity was affected.

Finally the culprit was isolated so now my hard drive is not working when there is no activity. I cannot be completely sure now but that program may have been AVG 8... that's my memory but may be faulty.

So the moral of this story is to try to solve this by a process of elimination of software that is running. Now the sleep mode works perfectly using Vista Ultimate and is set to sleep after one hour in my case.

Hope this helps.

Glenn

I agree with the other posters. Under a typical system nowadays, there always something happening in the bkgrd., that is normal. While you may find some pgm. more active than another, with all pgms., one may idle while another isn't, so for all intents and purposes unless you have a pressing need to leave the system on, turn it off. Of course that's up to you, but leaving it on will have the HD working a great deal of the time, so the only relief is turn it off.

tada -----Willy

I hope the on and off won't harm my computer too much.

Thanks for your help.

Oz