In the Task Manager right click on the svchost instance and pick Go to
service(s). This will open the Services tab with all the services that are
in that svchost instance highlighted with light blue. Next go to the
Reliability and Performance Monitor. Expand the Disk section and watch it
for a while noting the PIDs for the tasks using the disk the most. Go back
to Task manager and find the PIDs. You may have to check the services again.
It may take a while of going back and forth watching what is happening but
you should be able to determine what is using the disk and what it is doing
fairly quickly. Vista using the disk in the background isn't really a
problem. If you look at the IO Priority in the Reliability and Performance
Monitor a lot of the tasks are set to run in the background. They don't
really impact performance at this priority. For the CPU at 10-30% all the
time, that is not normal and would be what I would be looking at.

--
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/



"pcbilski" <guest@unknown-email.com> wrote in message
news:c6fb3cc383474a167f527ca514a82236@nntp-gateway.com...
>
> I have this strange problem where i can hear my hard drive
> reading/writing every second, then stopping, then starting again
> continuously.
> When i look at the process list i see svchost.exe is using between 10
> and 30% CPU which i do not think is normal.
> Can anyone help?
> Vista Ultimate 64 SP2 v. 113 (problem did not start with evaluation SP)
>
>
> --
> pcbilski