Today started like any other day at work. I sat down, logged into my PC and was greeted by the thrashing sound of my hard drive. I’ve come to realize that the bottleneck in my work PC is by far the hard drive. I don’t need any bench marking software, I simple try to access a file or two. Sometimes, I simply open windows explorer and wait.

I finally got so disgusted I fired up procman and dug through the activity to find the culprit.

I had to scroll down to the bottom of a couple thousand lines of activity before I saw a clear pattern, but lo and behold what I saw was incredible!

There were literally thousands of disk writes to my pagefile - and all I had done was log in!

The bizarre part was that the files being read and written to the swap file were files I was not touching.

I saw that the process performing all this thrashing was something called “ccmexec.exe”. I’d actually never heard of this process, but after some quick googling I discovered its the exe for the SMS Agent service.

This service (the  Systems Management Server service) performs an indexing or cataloging of all the files on the disk so that windows update will have the latest info on versions of OS files that may need patching. Sounds great, but I’m not sure it’s worth the cost considering the downtime and aggravation I experience waiting for this thing to chew through my 150GB drive.

My first instinct was to disable the service in the services control panel applet, but I figured that the corporate IT staff would eventually get a tad upset when they realized my system didn’t have the latest patches installed because I disabled the service.

So, I was faced with my own kobayashi maru scenario : I was ineffective while this thing chewed threw my file system, but I couldn’t disable the service without sending up corporate red flags that I was a bad citizen.

Then I hit on a solution - a scheduled task to ensure the service did run, just not when I was busy working. I actually used two batch files, one for each task of starting and stopping the service.

Open up notepad (or your text editor of choice), and type the following:

net start CcmExec

save the file as “SMS Agent start.bat”

Now, start a new text file and enter:

net stop CcmExec

save the file as “SMS Agent stop.bat”

Note: you can also replace “net” with “sc”, to use the newer Service Control manager command line tool.

Then, set the startup type of the SMS Agent Host service to “Manual” in the services control panel applet.

Next, create a scheduled task to run after hours that runs the “SMS Agent start.bat” file, and another task that runs the  “SMS Agent stop.bat” before you get into the office.

The best of both worlds - you remain productive and a good corporate citizen (after hours)!

• Microsoft FxCop doesn't like Microsoft generated code! The other day I thought it might be nice to "do the right thing" and give my code a run against Microsoft's FxCop. I ran it right out of the...
• The 3 Most Important Questions You Should Ask About Each Bug You Find. I stumbled upon (quite literally) an article by Tom Van Vleck titled Three Questions About Each Bug You Find today, and thought I would share it: "The key idea behind...
• Annoying "next message" behavior in Thunderbird, and how to stop it! I love the Thunderbird email client. I use the portable version on my thumb drive, but one thing has always bugged the hell out of me when I use it:...
• Arraylist and generics don't mix with IEnumerable(Of T).GetEnumerator. The other day I was writing an in-house tool to assist in some upgrades we were performing on client installations. This tool was supposed to perform its operations on a...
• 10 Useful, Often Overlooked HTML Tags. Pop quiz: When would you use the <wbr> tag, and what does it do? Yeah, I had no idea either. In fact, I had never even seen this tag before,...

• How To File Federal Taxes Online For Free If you have a simple or basic tax return there is no reason to pay to file your federal taxes - file free federal taxes online.  In addition, it is much more convenient and faster to process a tax return online. Filing Free Federal Taxes Online: Important Facts Most free......
• Snowboarding Safely pt 1 Snowboarding is one of the more popular snow based sports out there. Just like with nearly every other type of physical activity, people that go snowboarding are susceptible to being injured. Taking the right precautions and wearing the right protective gear is going to help to protect you from sustaining......
• Tips for Organizing Your Home Office. Because we are away camping this week, the following is a guest post from Emily over at Remodeling This Life. If you like what you see here, won't you consider subscribing to her feed? Is your workspace chaotic? Can't find things when you need them? Are you wasting time and......
• How to Soundproof a Room Whether you live by a busy road, you just had a new baby or your children have discovered the wonders of musical instruments, soundproofing a room has many benefits. Commonly, bedrooms are the rooms where soundproofing brings the most benefit, but literally any room can be soundproofed. It’s easier than......
• Clear the page file on Shutdown in XP This is one of those tweaks for XP that is useful if you have users that have a lot of sensitive information on their machines and you want to be sure that none of that information is left in the Page File forever.  It's not a panacea, but is extra......