Basic “debugging” of performance issues using the Vista Performance Monitor?

Question

My laptop hard drive is being hit hard when I boot up for a period of several minutes. I figured that using the Vista Performance Monitor was the right tool, but I'm not sure of what metrics to use to determine the culprit.

What are my first steps to figure out what's constantly hitting my hard drive?

Do I need to run a report, or is there some particular field or set of fields in the Performance Monitor that could quickly tell me what's going on?

Answer 1

The Performance Monitor should have a Disk Activity section, which will list processes that are accessing your disk. You can order by read or write activity, so you should be able to quickly locate the process that's causing the excessive read or write activity. I'm guessing it's the Search Indexer or Prefetch caching process that's causing your issue.