quote:
Originally posted by CookieRevised
It can also be very usefull to detect dubious hard disk activity. eg: all of a sudden your HDD starts to do a masive amount of stuff = this can indicate virus activity (eg: HDD is being formatted or erased!)... Or every second your hard disk light lights up, this can also indicate malicous activity which you would otherwise not notice... Etc.
its VERY unlikely that a virus would ever bother to erase things on your hard drive; the only real point of any recent malicious application is to connect to a botnet. disk activity fluctuates very frequently for no apparent reason (mostly if you don't have much RAM.) if there was no disk activity for a long period, and it suddently jumped without any user interaction, it could very well be a defragger or an indexer