Hardware interrupts on R61i...

My CPU usage would float around 30-50%, and nothing in Task Manager correlates to the usage. Running Process Explorer, I see that hardware interrupts alone uses up 30-50% of my CPU. I'm at a loss here, and this is pissing me off. I am regretting having ever bought this Thinkpad back in August. I had great plans with my Thinkpad, but so far none of the three laptops I've gone through can even handle simple stuff right.

This is on a brand new hard drive, XP fresh installed, and following the clean install guide. All drivers are up to date, and I can't figure out what's causing the interrupts to occur. None of the devices have an effect on it, IDE channel is in Ultra DMA, and standby is the only way to have it disappear, temporarily. All I could think of is that the chipset drivers don't play well with my R61i. I also updated the BIOs, which I feel is a mistake as well, as it also changed how the CPU whine behaved.

Any ideas on what the problem could be? I don't recall my old hard drive having any CPU usage problems, but the whine that you hear even on AC is different, more high pitched. I'll probably end up using the recovery disk to install XP on my new hard drive, but it's so freaking slow... installation and the performance...