How I fixed my busy hard drive issue on my PC

Few months back, I wrote an article about how to fix the busy hard drive issue on an XP computer , I actually did all the steps I have listed in the article and at the end of all the steps, it seemed like my busy hard drive issue got fixed for ever.
After a few weeks time, the red light under the start button started to glow continuos again and made me worry a lot. Even though I was really worried about the condition of my tower (CPU), I did not bother to look in to my CPU to know what’s really happening there. I was sure about one thing, about my CPU turning off and never turning on again!!
And my fears came true yesterday when my CPU went down without any notification. I was able to turn it on, but only for few seconds. I was so frustrated and got mad about the CPU.
Now here is what you should do if you are in the same situation. First, isolate the issue, make sure that it is not the software which is at fault but the hardware. How to do this? If you are not coming across any blue screen what so ever, it means that your software, hard disk and everything else is in good shape.
Let me interpret the exact issue I had so that you won’t confuse another issue with this one. My red light was glowing all the time, I wasn’t able to start the computer properly, it took very long time for my computer to turn on. Sometimes a black screen with the cursor will be there forever and finally the windows screen will appear.
Sometimes, the system will restart without any notification; it will continue to do all the day frustrating me. The tower is unusually hot and my CPU is very quiet.
If the above mentioned things are happening in your CPU, this is the issue folks!!
There are two possibilities. Either the fans running inside your tower (remember the fan
running in the mother board and the power supply fans are different). These fans cool the tower by blowing air in to it. During the repair, we found out that both fans have failed. Finally, we came to know the whole power supply box with a fan inside it have failed and that is the reason for all the start up troubles we had. I did not agree with my technician at first as I thought it my computer had some software issues.
He brought a new power supply box (costs under $10 here) , like the one below and replaced the faulty one. And that’s it!! Everything was back to normal and my computer is zooming like ever!

 

Solid steps to fix your busy hard drive issue(only for windows operating system)

I’m one among the thousands of you who is irritated to see the red light in the CPU/tower glowing constantly, it really annoys me because I certainly know that my hard drive is running constantly even without me using a single program in my computer
. When I researched about the issue, I found some of the most common issues and the most possible solutions to fix this issue, which I have shared with you.
Most of us do our work or browse internet with the help of a desktop rather than a laptop. Even though the processing speeds of laptops are comparatively lower than that of a desktop, hard drive busy issue in laptops are very rare.
Before looking in to the possible fixes for the hard drive busy issue, we should know what a busy hard drive can do to your desktop.

• There is a high possibility that busy had drives crash much faster than the normal ones.
• Files get corrupted and software that needs hardware acceleration will start to slow down drastically.
• Part of the hard drive may get corrupt leading to the loss of some valuable data.
• Whole operating system may crash and you will end viewing a black screen at some point.

Below given are some of the important reasons that cause the busy hard drive issue.

• Bad anti virus or anti malware program running in the background, even computer experts find it hard to detect these processes running in the background.
• Alteration in the windows power settings, make sure that your power settings does not keep the hard drive busy always.
• Corrupt registry files; this happens when you install too many programs to your computer. The registry gets populated and becomes corrupt at some point of time.
• Unwanted processes running in the background.
• Too many programs loaded during the start up, this instantly makes your hard drive busy and even crashes your computer.
• The data transfer speed under the device manager may have been incorrectly set.
• Your hard drive may be failing.

Here are some simple steps to fix the most common issues mentioned above.

• Do not install heavy anti virus software like McAfee, Norton etc. These software act like virus themselves at certain point and when you have a special antimalware software installed in the same computer, these huge Anti Virus program conflicts with those antimalware programs, which may trigger some unwanted secret functions that run in the background. The only possible solution In this case is to switch to lighter but safer software like AVG, Avira etc.
• Never ever install too many programs in your computer, even if you have great RAM speed. If you do need lots of programs, then make sure that you clean your registry while you are installing them, you can clean it either by going the registry manually by entering “regedit” in the “RUN” window. If you are not really aware how to do it, download free registry cleaners like ccleaner and clean your registry files.
• Always make sure that you have the power settings set up in a way that your hard drive will slow down when the computer is not in use. Since the hard drive varies from user to user, consult someone who knows the computer the best before setting the power settings.
• Kill the unwanted processes running in the background by pressing ALT+CTRL+DEL and then killing them manually, or you can kill the processes with the help of free process killers like Winpatrol Free to kill the unwanted processes running in the background.
• Change the way how your computer starts up by entering the commad “ msconfig” at the “ RUN” window. In there, under the startup tab, make sure only few programs that are very important to you are check marked. Google the processes listed under the startup tab and know whether they are useful or not, if they are not, uncheck them all right away and click OK button.
• To set the data transfer speed to the right number, it is better for you to get an expert advice before doing it as it is the last and extreme step to do.
• In most of the hard drive constant busy cases, the hard drive related to the issue is always healthy. However, if your hard drive is too old, then it is better for you to diagnose your harddrive with the help of free hardware diagnostic tools like CPU-Z , that helps you to know the health of your hard drive very accurately.

If none of these things are changing the status of your busy hard drive, it is time for you to start a discussion on some reliable forums or take some advice from a tech expert!