Why is my hard disk so active with Temp files?

[Sirty1000]

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r11/l33tpadawan/Untitled-2.png

 

This is a screenshot from my resource manager from Vista. My laptop has a reasonably good spec and yet continually crashes or slows down for no apparent reason. I was trawling through files etc when I decided to take a look at the resource manager and noticed that every second when the 'Disk' tab updated, it was swamped by processes from an apparently inactive account. I have a few questions:

 

1. Firstly, can someone explain to me in layman's terms what these tabs and readouts are?

 

2. Second, can someone tell me whether or not this type of activity is unusual in a laptop/PC when only one user is active?

 

3. The account in question I created for my sister, and although the account is logged off it still appears to be extremely active (or at least the Temp Files folder in it) and clogging my processes (the active files are from a game I have installed but am not playing). Can someone explain to me how to stop this happening?

[snow]

Hi Sirty, Welcome to Extreme Tech Support - Free PC Help

 

The tabs and readouts you view inside the resource manager are (from the left):

 

CPU:

Shows current CPU use by program thread.

 

Disk:

Shows the current Megabytes per second each thread is reading/writing to the hard disk.

 

Network:

Shows current network traffic per thread. Note that allot of this will be 'internal' traffic between programs, and not necessarily traffic over your actual network.

 

Memory:

Shows how many times the computer has had to look for something on the hard disk, because it wasn't in your RAM (a page fault).

 

 

There is a simple explanation for the game files being accessed. Vista has several running services that will do this.

 

System restore/Volume shadow copy:

Will make copies of folders for backup while you are logged on.

 

Windows search:

Will index all of the files and folders on your computer to make searching faster, this can be very disk intensive and will run constantly in the background. It will lessen once it has finished indexing all current files though.

Windows Defender:

By default this will scan your computer once a day in the background.

Superfetch:

This will cache the most used files on your computer into RAM, ready for fast loading.

 

 

I think superfetch is the most likely answer, as it will index game files that are used frequently while a game is running. I see this on my own computer whenever I do a full restart.

 

Some of these services can be turned off to improve startup time and system performance. I always turn off Windows Search and Windows Defender. If you'd like advice on that, then just say.