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[Tikiman]

My hard drive is active nearly all the time. The sound is killing me and I wonder when it will wear out! I have deactivated scheduled defragment jobs and turned off Windows File Search [OS feature] to no avail. Any suggestions for the next steps to try?

[patrickmarshall]

My first guess would be that you either have a very much misbehaving program or a virus. Are you running an antivirus program?

[Speedball]

Vista and Win 7 are more active from a disk perspective than XP. I suspect it's due to a lot more indexing and clean-up going on in there. You may not be able to decrease the amount of disk activity much but a couple things to check would be whether you have the Windows (or third-party) disk optimizing tool running and whether you have enough RAM for Vista -- it takes considerably more memory to keep Vista happy over XP and what you may have is a situation where you're constantly swapping.

[Terrance]

Another possibility is that you have installed a rootkit that allows someone else to control your computer and turn it into a warez server or spam machine. It's not unusual to unknowingly install a rootkit...for example, Sony BMG released over 50 albums on compact disc that will silently install a rootkit, even if you opt out and never actually play the CD in your machine.

As a result, as the illegal software/music/movies are uploaded and downloaded to your computer via a swarm of other people on the Internet, your hard drive will spin like crazy.

It was actually a brainiac at Microsoft who was testing his new anti-rootkit tool that discovered what is now known as the "Sony/BMG Fiasco". You can download his tool at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897445.aspx

[Tikiman]

Thanks for all of the suggestions and input. I have 2GB of Ram and 4GB of assigned virtual memory. I run MS Security Essentials as my virus protection. I performed a full scan and it picked up Selace A and B, Meredrop, and Java/CVE-2008-5353.B. All were deleted and the hard drive access is reduced notably - so I am guessing the maleware was the [main] issue.