Then I suggest you find out what is causing the activity by monitoring your system.

I use Gkrellm2 and can see when there is activity on my HDD, among many other things. I always keep a terminal open running top so I can keep an eye out for any suspicious processes running, and have watched it so long I can what ones normally should be running.


I wasn't trying to be a smartypants when I stated I leave my laptops plugged in and running. I Just never take mine out of the house and actually do use them as desktops.

dave@burn-it.co.uk thought I was trying to be funny, and it's an honest mistake. Sometimes my text is hard to make out and doesn't always come off the way I intend it. It's the difference in when I speak as if I was talking to someone personally or use a more formal style of speech, and sometimes switch styles mid-stride.

Trihexagonal, I didn't think you were being a smarty pants, and that is why I didn't understand dave's comment to you. Installed Gkrellm2 and will also try top. I had put iotop in my startup outputting to a text file to see if I can see anything. This will probably take a few days or a week or so to examine the file and see if there is something weird. Thanks for your input.

Which one??

The one where he quoted you and then said:

I was saying snap to having laptops that are always plugged in and used as desktops!!

My bad. Maybe I was the one who was having trouble making out text.

It does happen a lot with mine though, and why I said something about it.

BTW, if you're going to be using Gkrellm there are almost 200 skins for it you might as well have to choose from. I usually use one of the glass or invisible, all my screenshots show it. Individually extract the themes directly into the ~/.gkrellm2/themes directory and they will be available through the menu.

http://www.muhri.net/gkrellm/

Trihexagonal

Thanks, it's always nice to have eye candy. BTW, do you use OpenBSD as a desktop system or just in servers?

I tried to set it up as a desktop once, and cracked it up at one point (forgot what I did). Currently, I cannot do that because I have no extra machines to put it on.

I use FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris as desktop Operating Systems and am on my Thinkpad W520 running OpenBSD 6.3 now.

I use ports with FreeBSD, but the binary pkg system with OpenBSD for installation of 3rd party programs. I can have my OpenBSD desktop fully set up with all the programs I normally use and Fluxbox as my WM in about an hour. Building a FreeBSD desktop from ports take the better part of of a full day, depending on the machine, but I get a custom desktop from the ground up out of it.

I have a tutorial on Building a FreeBSD Desktop From Scratch, if you're interested. OpenBSD is easy enough I don't see the need for writing one on how to set it up.

Hey! Thanks for that. I am aware of another one: https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/

but glad to have all the FreeBSD tutorials I can get because I want to learn BSD.

Mine is a beginners tutorial with a target audience of someone who has never used UNIX or the command line. I spell it out step-by-step with the goal getting them to a fully functional desktop complete with security and system files.

I've heard people who've used it say they're doing things and don't fully understand why, but it got them to the desktop. If there had been something similar available to me in '98 would have started using FreeBSD then, but the installation process looked beyond what I considered my skillset at the time and TBH intimidated me.

It wasn't till I discovered PC-BSD in 2005 that I started using it. It got me to the desktop and I took it from there.

I had been looking at getting some kind of *nix on my computer since I-can't-remember-when, but I know way before 2005. I used OS/2 before Windows, and never thought Windows was good enough. But I could never figure out Linux or BSD. I could never get them installed for several years. I think I discovered PC-BSD back in 2007 or 2008, and it installed perfectly on an old Dell that a customer gave me. I thought it was great back then, but I still didn't have the knowledge to use it effectively. (I'm a slow learner). The last couple of years, I cannot get any PC-BSD or TrueOS to install on either my laptop or the desktops I used to have (they crash during boot up). I did get FreeBSD-12-CURRENT installed on my desktop and worked on configuring it, but had too many irons in the fire so had to abandon it. GhostBSD installs nicely in my VirtualBox and looks very promising. Hopefully, one of these days, I can get a new box and install it there as my daily driver.