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XP Pro, Service Packs, and Disk Writes

Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2010 6:17 pm
by casm
Hopefully someone else can confirm or deny this, because it's driving me up the wall.  Base OS is XP Pro, SP0.  Yep, the media I'm using really is nearly nine years old at this point.

Install from CD.  Update to SP1A; disk writes are minimal.  Update to SP3; disk writes everywhere.

Slipstream SP3 into the same CD and install from it.  Disk writes everywhere.

Note that these are clean installations with only the Service Packs installed; no hotfixes have been applied, and no 3rd-party software has been installed.  Drivers for the touchscreen, audio, bezel buttons, and graphics chipset are installed.

So far I haven't been able to track down what's causing this.  All I know is that it started with either SP2 or SP3.  System restore, the Indexing service, Automatic Updates, and WBEM are all disabled.  Windows Search is not installed.  Turning off the pagefile has no discernible effect.  Diskmon reports the writes, but doesn't tell me what's causing it.  Filemon has been semi-helpful in tracking some things down, but it's not telling the whole story.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?  I'm at a loss for what to look into next.

Re: XP Pro, Service Packs, and Disk Writes

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 7:35 pm
by mistico4
Hello casm

Unfortunately I can't help you, I also wish your question could be answered.

I had diskmon and filemon working but they suddenly stopped working and report nothing, do you have enabled WMI services? When you were with SP1, did Filemon show disk writes to desktop.ini? Thank you