On 2/11/2014 1:04 PM, R.Wieser wrote: Hello Ron,

Some DVD drives hit the bus at that rate and it flashes the HD light.

Even when the drive is not in use by me (no DVD in it) ? Odd.

Dell latitude laptops all do it, anyway.

I forgot to mentuion the type of PC it happens on, its a small tower
version.

I have been following this thread and I haven't found anything that I
really disagree with. But I do still have some commends and questions.

First of all, how do you know this activity is preventing sleep?
Regardless for the sake of argument, some activity doesn't affect the
timeout timers.

Secondly, many years ago I had an odd file being created in a folder
that I was watching for something. Being curious and not knowing who or
what was creating this file, I found a disk write utility. It wasn't one
that I could use for one folder, but monitors everything. Okay, I
figured good enough, how many things could Windows write to in a few
minutes anyway?

So running this utility, like 10 writes per second was happening while
Windows was idle. Whoa! I can't keep up with that so I found an option
to log this. So just running it a few minutes, I stopped it and there
was hundreds of writes in the log with what file, path, what created it,
etc. The mass majority of them were changes to the Windows registry. I
was shocked!

Nothing very big or anything, but just tiny few byte changes. Count down
timers? Who knows, but there were tons of them. Most Windows machines
cache writes in a buffer and waits until it is a good time to write to
the drive.

Anyway some things count as far as the count down timers go and some
things doesn't. If they don't, then it isn't going to affect them, now
is it?

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Thunderbird v24.3.0
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 7 Home SP1