How do I find out why my computer is thrashing its drive?

"From my Post on What’s making my disk thrash in Windows XP?

Download Process Explorer from Microsoft / Sysinternals.

Run it and click view > Select columns. Click on the Process Performance Tab, and select ""I/O Reads"" and ""I/O Writes"".

You can do this from Task manager, but I prefer using Process Explorer.

You can then sort by these columns and see what is doing the most read / writes.

(if using Vista / 7 remember to run as ADMIN (or click file then ""show details for all processes"" which will do this for you)

I tend to find that Dropbox and mesh on a few machines I support seem to run wild with read/write bytes 24/7 so if you use any sycn software, first bet is to look at that, however running this tool should tell you exactly what is wrong.

In addition, you can click on any of the graphs at the top of the screen which brings up a ""System Information"" dialog of historic information. One of the graphs (third one down) is ""I/O Bytes"", Simply hover your mouse over any of the peaks, and it will tell you what is taking up the most resources. - Exactly what you want!"

Use Process Explorer from the same Syinternals site as Procmon to get the break down of the svchost processes.