Why am I seeing excessive disk activity when installing applications?

Posted by Kev on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Kev
Published on 2010-02-23T21:39:54Z Indexed on 2010/03/08 18:21 UTC
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Windows

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windows-7

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installer

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on a Dell Vostro 1720 with 8GB of RAM, 7200RPM Disk, 2.53 GHz Core2Duo (Windows 7 64 bit is a supported option and the laptop came with the OS pre-installed).

I'm noticing some fairly excessive disk activity when running installers. For example the Visual Studio 2010 RC installer constantly accessed the disk for ~10 minutes. It was so excessive that I was unable to use the machine until this ceased.

Today I installed Trillian Astra 4.1 for Windows (latest build from the website). Again when I ran the installer I was pretty much locked out of the machine until the disk activity calmed down.

In both cases when I eventually managed to launch task manager I could see that the CPU was sitting at around 5% to 7% utilisation whilst this was going on.

All other disk related activity is fine, the machine is snappy and applications launch without delay. It's just when I run an installer I see this odd behaviour.

Why would this be?

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