I don't think the button you mentioned exists in the XP Task Manager - you
may have been using Win7 to long now to remember.

Under the Performance tab are a Resource Monitor - style "graphical"
bar-meter to show real-time usage for both CPU strain (& running history)
and Page File usage (& running history).

Also, there are four boxes beneath the two "graphical" meters, displaying
constantly updating numerical values for :

Totals
Physical Memory (K)
Commit Charge (K)
Kernel Memory (K)

....but again, no "buttons".....

There are no "buttons" under the Resource tab, whatsoever!



On another related matter, perhaps the [free] utility from sysinternals may
be of some [diagnostic] help here...

It's the "Disk Monitor" utility, and once run, can be minimized to the
system tray and acts just like any "Hard-drive lamp" on any PC. Appearing
red for current disk i/o "writes", green for current "reads" and yellow for
"no disk i/o".

Once copied from it's ZP-file to any place included in your %path%
variable, you can start it already minimised to the system tray from a
registry "Run-Key" command :

diskmon.exe /l

Download the Disk Monitor utility from the sysinternals website at :
http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/DiskMon.zip

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London. :-)




"Stan Brown" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:26:00 -0600, Jim wrote:

I noticed my hard drive light is now almost constantly on, no matter
if nothing is running, with just the desktop showing.

Doing CTL ALT DELETE I see all kinds of processes running, and tried
to look them up doing google search, but can't find anything that
I can recognize that might cause this. My laptop running the same
XP Professional doesn't do that, when you stop running programs the
hard drive activity light stops.

How can I find out what is causing this and remove it from my
system? I tried stopping various processes but am afraid to
terminate too many for fear of what might happen.

Would a list of the processes running in the Task Manager help
in diagnosing this problem? I'd hate to have to do a complete
re-install again, it takes days.

Hi. I used to have XP, but now I have Windows 7, so I'm not sure this
will be helpful. But since no one else has replied ...

On the Performance tab of Task Manager, look near the bottom for a
button labeled Resource Monitor. If you have it, click it for a
utility that shows disk usage by process on one of its tabs. That is
a bit more focused that simply looking up every process on the
Processes tab of Task Manager, though the latter is possible too.

I had a similar issue in Windows 7, which turned out to be
TrustedInstaller. But I believe that was introduced in Vista, so it
would not be applicable to you.

However, you still might be experiencing Windows searching for
updates. You could try changing that to non-automatic. IIRC, you
open the Security Center and click "change how Windows search for
updates" -- I'm sorry I can't be more precise.

It should go without saying, but I'll say it -- have you done a
thorough malware scan recently, with definitions up to date?


--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...