Vista seems always busy?

Hello all,

I am what some may consider a geek. I have been building systems for many many years and have always taken pleasure in being able to "lock a system down". In doing this through the years I have been able to get a system to a point where I know what the computer is doing at any given time and really never had any need to question the occasional drive spin or CPU throttle (very rare on other versions of Windows).

Now comes Vista! I go through the regular stuff (turn off services I don't need, make sure I have a trimmed start up) and any time the system should be idle, it seems like the drive runs and runs and if I let the resource monitor run I can also see it is using CPU cycles. I have turned off indexing, no restore points here (I backup regularly), Comodo and volume control only running and it just feels like this thing is always busy doing things that I have no idea about.

Just yesterday it was MCUpdate.exe doing something keeping it busy for well over an hour, search what that may be on the net and find it may have something to do with McAfee (which I don't have BLOAT or its for Media Center).

Whatever the case, does Vista ever get to the point that you "feel" like you know what it is doing at all times? Somehow thinking I know what it is doing gives me sense of security.

I just wonder if anyone else feels this way, if you do how have you dealt with it?

Thanks for the help!

Aye I like knowing everything my computer is doing at any given time aswell.

I have also noticed Vista likes to 'do stuff' while the computer is idle.

Regarding the HD and cpu usage my theory is that its either defragging or prefetching stuff... but I haven't really looked that much into it.

I've basically accepted the fact that with increasingly complex OS's it becomes more and more difficult to the point of impossible to keep tabs on EVERYTHING your computer is doing at a given time.

I believe that knowledge is power and that any computer user should make it his/her job to know as much about computers as they can but there comes a point where we're going to have to accept the fact that we can't know everything and we're going to have to rely on our OS =)

I am very interested to make my OS as transparent as possible, but find it very difficult to get all the answers.
Not only to go through tons of information to find the relevant bits, but also I have the feeling that certain answers are simply not existing.

There are comprehensive sources like this forum for example, but if I take the subject of the OP of this threrad, having disabled almost everything what could possibly slow down my HDD, I can hear a never ending grinding right now, while I type this posting of mine.

Transparency seems to be the keyword in my eyes.
As long as the user has the choice, no complaints.
But as it seems, other people have decided for you at one point, and no matter if you want it or not, you are forced to use it.
I agree that users have to educate themselves in order to be able to make modifications the way they want them.
But what if you have tried everything already and it still doesn't work ?
I feel reluctant to "just accept it".