Why am I seeing excessive disk activity when installing applications?
- by Kev
I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on a Dell Vostro 1720 with 8GB of RAM, 7200RPM Disk, 2.53 GHz Core2Duo (Windows 7 64 bit is a supported option and the laptop came with the OS pre-installed).
I'm noticing some fairly excessive disk activity when running installers. For example the Visual Studio 2010 RC installer constantly accessed the disk for ~10 minutes. It was so excessive that I was unable to use the machine until this ceased.
Today I installed Trillian Astra 4.1 for Windows (latest build from the website). Again when I ran the installer I was pretty much locked out of the machine until the disk activity calmed down.
In both cases when I eventually managed to launch task manager I could see that the CPU was sitting at around 5% to 7% utilisation whilst this was going on.
All other disk related activity is fine, the machine is snappy and applications launch without delay. It's just when I run an installer I see this odd behaviour.
Why would this be?