Vista: A very annoying problem [continous activity]

For some odd reason, the activity light in my Dell just won't stop... it's annoying the hell out of me. The noise of the HDD activity, or whatever it is, will not stop.

Has anyone been experiencing this?

Vista starts up normal, and when its done loading, the activity [during idle] basically stops. But once I open a program, the activity will just not stop. Even after closing the program and leaving my PC idle for over 15 minutes, the activity is still going crazy.

I've tried checking under Windows Task Manager, and nothing seems to be loading or active, with the exception of some minor CPU activity.

What can I do?

Its driving me crazy!

BTW, this is on Vista Home Premium 32-bit on a Dell E1705.

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While I'm not an expert on this, excessive hard drive accessing might be caused if you have an insufficient amount of memory installed.

 

I highly doubt Vista's using all 2 GB of my ram.

Here's what the Task Manager states:

CPU Usage: ~ 1-3 average
Memory: 978 MB (47% Used Mem), 1368 MB Cached, 48 (?) Free.

Not really sure what it means by "48 MB Free", because it clearly states that 978 MB are in use, with above 50% memory unused.

This is so strange...

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Indexing, completely normal.

How long have you had Vista? After a week the amount of indexing drops dramatically. Vista will also defrag, run Windows defender and things like this in the background.

 

You could try Process Explorer;
when its open right-click on a column header, > select columns > process performance tab > check I/O Delta total bytes (the option all the way at the bottom right).

That should give you a good idea what process is reading/writing the HDD.