Indexing files can keep your hard drive busy

Question: When my screen saver starts on my Toshiba 220CDS notebook, the hard drive is active for about ten minutes, and all the while my screen saver, the cube one that comes with Windows 95, is spinning away. After 10 minutes of continuous hard drive activity, it stops and the screen saver keeps going. If I touch a key or move the pointer, my desktop or whatever application I had open pops back with no problem. My question is: What is with all that hard drive activity immediately after the screen saver starts up? —djskakum

Answer: The best way to solve this problem and to minimize hard drive spinning, according to technical support at ToshibaDirect.com, would be to disable Microsoft’s FindFast function by removing it from your Start folder. (Anything in the StartUp folder will automatically launch every time Windows 95/98 boots up.)

FindFast is part of the Microsoft Office 97 installation. It indexes the hard drive during system inactivity so that it can quickly find files when requested in Microsoft Office applications.

For example, when you open a file in Microsoft Word and a dialog box appears for you to select a file, the FindFast index helps display the files listed on the hard drive faster.

To remove it, delete the FindFast shortcut from the StartUp folder, which can be found at C:windowsStart MenuProgramsStartUp.

If you want FindFast to continue to index your hard drive, but do it less frequently, go to the Windows Control Panel and click the FindFast utility to start it. Then you can change the frequency of when the index is created. To do this, select the Update Interval option under the Index menu in FindFast.

See another column on hard drive grinding.