Yet Another "reason" to run my HD!!

[MilesAhead]

Hmmmmm, thought I had my HD quieted down when I disabled
the Crawl Start Pages scheduled task! But, it turns out that
even though I opted out of the Customer Experience Improvement
Program in Control Panel, the task scheduler was still running the
tasks:

Consolidator and OptinNotification

To turn them off go into Task Scheduler(make sure
in the View Menu click Show Hidden Tasks or you won't
even realize a lot of these sneakies can be disabled from
this applet) and select Task Scheduler Library => Microsoft => Windows
=> Customer Experience Improvement Program.

Right click Consolidator and click Disabled
Right click OptinNotification and click Disabled

I bought this PC in April 2007 and I'm still shutting this kind of stuff off!!
Geez!!

[MilesAhead]

Also found Task Scheduler was still running MsCtfMonitor even though I uninstalled
ctfmon.exe. This is a thing if you want voice recognition in word processing etc.

The Task Scheduler won't let you disable it from the "regular" admin account. If you
really want to mess around with all the settings you can check out this tutorial how
to activate the "real" Administrator account in Vista:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67567-administrator-account.html?filter[11]=User%20Accounts

[MilesAhead]

May have hit pay dirt

I think I may have finally hit pay dirt!
It seemed like lsass.exe was running my HD but in actuality
it was svhost.exe, which launches services. Similar hits pop
up in Google as far back as 2004 where some guys have HD
run on but most don't. My new theory is that it's due to the
fact that the desktops in question are Media Center PCs.

These run the 2 services Function Discovery Provider Host and
Function Discovery Resource Publication which publishes
multimedia resources on the network. I diabled both of these
and now when svhost.exe runs checking files, it checks a bunch
of .dlls and stuff in the system folders, but it doesn't read my .avi
and .mp3 files. So the HD runs only for a couple of minutes instead
of 20. Plus it's not totally pegged out so you can actually say, load
a browser while this is going on!!

Keeping my fingers crossed!!

[MilesAhead]

Well, that last change seemed to help quite a bit. Plus I googled for a description of Vista Scheduled Tasks and disabled all the stuff I didn't think I'd ever need on this machine.

I have ShadowCopy Service set to Manual so typically when I create a Restore Point it wakes up the drive and it goes through and looks at a whole bunch of files for awhile. Other than that now and then I get some Explorer and svchost activity that works my HD but it typically settles down in 3 or 4 minutes instead of 20. Seems stable enough.

I printed out my Services list and current state of each so that should give me a head start when I get my next Vista machine.