Turning off background defragmenting

[shyronnie]

I suspect that my Windows 7 laptop defrags whenever it's idle. How do I turn it off? I want to do the defragmenting myself. And FYI, the scheduler is not turned on, so the "turn off the scheduler" answer is out of the window.

[tehboris]

7 and Vista defrag on a schedule weekly. It does not do it any other way (except manually of course).

[xcorvis]

If scheduler is off, the disk activity you're seeing is probably Windows doing file indexing for search. Or it could be other maintenance tasks like virus scanning.

[shyronnie]

Is there a way to know what exactly it's doing?

[tokenuser]

taskmgr

Just remember that Windows now tries to max out its resources using a preemptive computing model.
That means that the CPU may run close to max (under the current energy saving settings), the RAM will be sitting at capacity, and the hard drive may well be running high.

Why?

The system works in the background indexing, it works trying to predict what you will want next so that its there and in memory when you need it. It does these things at a lower priority than applications run, so as soon as you need the horsepower it is there for you and not the system.