How-to: Reduce hard disk access in Windows 7

Once per minute, Windows 7 writes a timestamp to disk. This enables diagnostic tools to check whether and when Windows has been shut down unexpectedly. However, this is only useful for servers and company computers. For home usage, you can safely disable the timestamp. This reduces write access to your hard disk.

1. Click Start.
2. Into the search box, enter cmd.
3. At the top of the start menu, the search result cmd.exe appears. Right-click it, then choose Run as administrator.
4. Enter the following command into the appearing elevated command prompt: fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
5. Press Return to set the setting, then enter exit to close the command prompt.

From your next reboot, Windows will stop recording the regular timestamps.