When I attempt to use my computer after it sits idle for any length of time, I can hear the hard drive revving up and then it makes a clunking sound. ie; I sit down to use my computer, I click on the start button on the task bar, I will notice some of the menu items cannot be seen. Then the hard drive will start revving up, make its clunking noise and then everything that was not visible in the start menu appears. From their everything seems to work fine.
Is this a problem I should be concerned about and if it is what can I do to fix it?

Thanks,
Gene

It sounds like it is just slow to come out of stand bye mode. How big is your hard drive, what kind of hard drive is it, how full is it, how much ram do you have, and what is your processor speed? Did this just start happening, or has it always done this? It could be a program running in the backgound (screen saver, or power saving, etc...) that only runs when computer sits idle, and it is freezing or something, but since it comes back after a few moments, it sounds like typical windows, cause even my athlon 600 with 256 megs of ram takes a little bit to come back after going into power saving mode. Of course windows 98 doesn't utilize 256 megs of ram, so I downgraded to 128, taking that 128 and putting it into my Multimedia system that uses my T.V. as a monitor... My house is a computer funhouse, only kitchen and bathroom don't have a computer sitting in them.

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Joe Redd
MCP

I have a 300mhz pentium II , windows 95, 64 MB of RAM, 5 GB hard drive, 1.35 GB used space, I don't know what what type of hard drive I have. In my device manager it just says Generic IDE Type47. I don't have my computer set to go into any type of power save or stand by mode unless it dose that on it's own? I do use the screen savers on the computer. However, I have turned that off to see if it still happens and it made no difference. It's done this for some time now and I don't remember if it has always done this or not. I reformatted my hard drive some time ago mybe that caused it to start happening. Before I reformatted my drive their was no suspend option in the start menu and now thier is, I wonder if the computer is going into suspend mode. Maybe that causes a problem and thats why it was removed from the start menu (I ordered my computer from Quantex). But, anyway thanks for your help.

Gene,

How long has it been since you ran scandisk and defrag? If you use your computer, especially on the Internet, it's best to run defrag at least once a week, and I always delete the Temporary Internet files first.
When your hard drive becomes fragmented it can make a difference in performance. The files get scattered all over the drive, and it takes more head movement to find them, thus more time to bring it up on screen.
The clunking noise concerns me, that's why I recommend running scandisk. Unusual noises can easily mean serious hard drive problems. I usually try to run it in DOS and use the command line:
scandisk c: /autofix /nosummary /surface
which simply tells scandisk to fix any errors, without the pop up prompts, and to run a surface scan. Boot to a win95 start up disk or use the F8 key and choose Command Prompt Only. After running scandisk, reboot and defrag, and shut down anything that's running in the background, especially virus scanner.


Also, before letting your computer sit idle for a while you might clear out some memory by opening notepad and typing one letter, highlight, right click and copy that single letter to the clipboard, and close notepad. Tell it no, don't save the changes. This clears some, but not all of the info that's been stored in memory.

With win95 I also find it helpful to restart the computer every couple of days, if you leave it running all the time like I do. Mine is never shut down, except when I hear thunder coming in...but I run win98...I still reboot every few days.


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Many drives make an initial "clunk" as the actuator assembly unparks, and it's nothing to be concerned about as long as it isn't too loud, and as long as it doesn't change over time. Kind of like what they tell you about moles. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif
This is almost certainly being caused by a power management setting in either the BIOS or windows. Go into the Control Panel and find the "Power" item and change the hard drive spin-down settings. The drive shouldn't do it by itself.

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
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Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.

Originally posted by ixl:
Many drives make an initial "clunk" as the actuator assembly unparks, and it's nothing to be concerned about as long as it isn't too loud, and as long as it doesn't change over time. Kind of like what they tell you about moles. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif
This is almost certainly being caused by a power management setting in either the BIOS or windows. Go into the Control Panel and find the "Power" item and change the hard drive spin-down settings. The drive shouldn't do it by itself.



I did'nt know windows managed the power to my disk drives. When I look at the settings it goes into low power mode after 30 min and that seems to be the cause. I have learned something new about windows today.
Thanks for your assistance.