Is this normal?

[Caduceus]

I have noticed that when I am away from my pc, and return to it, the noise of the PC processing something (is it the hard drive doing something? kind of dull grating noise) is happening without breaks in it.
Then as soon as I even move the mouse, it stops.

Is this spyware noticing my mouse, and assumedly my PC, is unattended, and hacking into my PC?

Thanks all
Cad

[rich1231]

Can be all sorts of things.

AV software taking advantage of nothing else running, or more likely some sort of desktop search indexing.

Edited by rich1231 on Friday 23 March 11:35

[toni896]

It's normal, even if a little scary esp at 9pm when noone else is in the building.

[road2ruin]

More than likely it is windows indexing. It happens whe it detects the computer has been idle for a while. Its supposed to make things run quicker! It could also be a virus scanner some of these work at specific time or at random times when again the machine is idle. Alternatively it might be about to explode. Hope not though.

[Caduceus]

THanks for the replies chaps.
I've done a SpyBot S&S and Windows Defender, and nothing to worry about. So it must be that indexing malarky.

[aideen]

Process Explorer is very useful. See:

www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

I added it to Programs => Startup on my PC and have it running all the time.
Even when minimized it shows a small graph of CPU activity.