Very occasionally my computer goes through a period of a few minutes when a task "running in the background" causes disk activity to go up. I can still work on my computer but operations take longer to complete so I would rather this happened at a time when I am not using the computer such as in the early hours of the morning.
When I look at the Task Scheduler I notice there are a lot of menus to expand and some tasks are triggered at a set time and some are not.
How can I place a button on my quick launch toolbar (the bar which runs along the bottom of my screen) which when clicked will pop up a window showing the top 10 tasks in order of descending disk activity?
I am not averse to doing any coding but would obviously prefer configuring existing facilities if these are available and if this is easier.
Perhaps what I am looking for is the ability to open the "Display all running tasks" pop-up in Task Scheduler but instead of having to click a button to open the Task Scheduler and then a link to show the pop-up I want to just perform one click. Ideally I also want the list sorted in order of descending disk activity so the task which causes most disk activity is at the top.
Cutting the number of operations to launch is important here because when your computer is being taken over by a resource hungry task, it takes time to reach the point where you can see what is going on and when that point is reached the activity which you want to identify has subsided to a point which allows the launch steps to complete.
I would also welcome any simple advice such as opening Task Scheduler when the activity dies down to see which task has the most page faults (or other quantity). I am not sure if looking at page faults is valid. Obviously if svchost.exe is at the top of the list and this involves a large number of services it will be difficult to stop and start each one whilst the disk is thrashing. As such I want to home in as close as possible to the culprit before taking further steps to home in.
Please note that I am up-to-date with running Windows Updates, I perform regular virus scans and I run a reputable commercial virus scanner with current file definitions. I do not suspect a virus is causing this disk activity so this question is not asking for advice on how to detect a virus although I cannot rule that possibility out. In fact when I submitted all 105 processes which I have running to VirusTotal, all came back zero except for Java Update Scheduler which came back 1/55. I interpret this to mean that it is likely that this disk activity is NOT due to a virus. In fact when I specifically submitted the Java Update Scheduler file to VirusTotal it reported that there were strong indicators suggesting that the file was safe to use.
I run Windows 7 Professional.
You are now done. Whenever disk activity goes up, just click the Process Explorer icon in the Quick Launch toolbar and you will immediately see which process is causing most disk activity.