Question: I have a problem that my windows 7 computer sometimes starts accessing the disk like crazy for maybe 10 minutes at a time. The process in question is the “system” process. I have disabled superfetch and hibernation on my computer, if that makes any difference. I disabled those to see if they were the cause of the problems, but no change. I have 6 GB of RAM and only the web browser was started when I took the screenshot, so I don’t think it was thrashing due to page faults.
Any ideas on how to find the cause of this?
Answer: Use xperf from the WPT (part of the Windows 8 SDK) to trace disk IO:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2009/08/17/xperf-to-investigate-slow-i-o-issues.aspx
Run the script, minimize the CMD Window and when you have the issue again, go back to the cmd, wait 15-20s, press a key to stop logging. Open it with xperfview and look in the Disk IO graph which files the SYSTEM process writes/reads.