How can I tell what my disk is doing? Often the disk light is on continuously when there is nothing actually happening that I am aware of. Nick Porter
Use Sysinternals' FileMon, a free program that tracks every open, read, write or delete. This was produced independently, but Microsoft liked Sysinternals' utilities so much it bought the company. However, FileMon and RegMon have now been replaced by Process Monitor for later versions of Windows including Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 and Vista.
But it's generally easier to identify activities by looking at the running processes using Windows Task Manager or, preferably, Sysinternals' Process Explorer. This also means you can kill a process and see if the disk activity stops. Often the culprit is the Windows Indexing Service (cisvc.exe).
