I'm sitting a my laptop and the disk is spinning like a demon and I'm wondering why? I'm not "doing anything" and so it worries me that my disk is whirring and whirring. Maybe this is irrational but it does.

I bring up the Resource Monitor and I find that it's a svchost.exe process that is doing a tonne of i/o on the pagefile (Resource Monitor is good for this stuff).

This puzzles me. Why should I be doing so much paging activity when I'm not "doing anything"?

Then (I think) I figure it out.

I run up a console, do a "net stop superfetch". Almost immediately the pagefile activity stops.

Inside of the past few mintues, I'd shut down a VPC image. This was taking 1.5GB of memory so I'm guessing that when all that memory becomes available, SuperFetch kicks into gear and starts trying to pro-actively bring pages into memory.

So, if your laptop's noisy try looking at the Search service and the SuperFetch service to quieten it down a little.

Note: I'm sure this wouldn't happen if I was on battery power and I know that it's all probably low-priority I/O but the disk still rattles :-)