Disk Thrashing (partially solved)

[ChrisGreaves]

Old DELL Win7 system, grinds to a halt from time to time, as in, thirty seconds waiting for a keyboard response. On the front of the laptop chassis the hard drive light is lit constantly; it is not flickering. Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) shows lots of disk activity and lots of CPU. I wander around the internet and see a suggestion that I run Services(Ctrl+Esc; services.msc) and scroll down to Windows Search, right-click, properties and set it to disabled.

Then REBOOT. This seems to have solved my problem (hence "partially solved").
But if you find any other causes of the system thrashing the hard disk, please post here.
Cheers, Chris

[PJ_in_FL]

Lack of sufficient RAM.

If you have less than 4GB on a Win 7 machine, it is probably moving applications from/to RAM to/from the paging file on disk.

[ChrisGreaves]

Lack of sufficient RAM. If you have less than 4GB on a Win 7 machine, it is probably moving applications from/to RAM to/from the paging file on disk.

Thanks PJ. 4GB of RAM.
I should have mentioned that this "drive light full on" has been in effect over the past few months, but was not a problem before that. Further: that for the rest of this normal-workload day that drive light flickers for a second when I open a file and then goes out. The 4GB RAM is the original, so this disk thrashing is something fairly recent.
That said, a check of RAM sounds like a good diagnostic.
Also possibly the SWAP/paging file
Cheers, Chris

[Mico]

Yeah, you should definitely add some RAM to your computer.

[ChrisGreaves]

Yeah, you should defenitely add some RAM to your computer.

Thanks Mico, but this is either my oldest or second-oldest of 6 laptops.
I have more powerful beasties sitting on a shelf, but I want to be prepared in case anyone asks me to run a class in Turing Machines. Practically any machine will suffice, as long as it can run Office97.
Cheers, Chris

[Mico]

Thanks Mico, but this is either my oldest or second-oldest of 6 laptops.
I have more powerful beasties sitting on a shelf, but I want to be prepared in case anyone asks me to run a class in Turing Machines. Practically any machine will suffice, as long as it can run Office97.
Cheers, Chris

Ahaha. Well, you're right. And good luck with that!