Constant hard drive usage

[Spin]

Gurus,

The hard drive light on my Windows XP SP2 Dell D600 laptop is frequently
constantly lit up, indicating constant hard drive activity. I have
defragmented and the degfragmentation report says the drive is at optimal
level. I have only 512MB of RAM. In Task Manager, my CPU activity is
always low even though the hard drive is thrashing about. How can I tell
what program is hitting the drive?

 

[Charlie Tame]

Gurus,

The hard drive light on my Windows XP SP2 Dell D600 laptop is frequently
constantly lit up, indicating constant hard drive activity. I have
defragmented and the degfragmentation report says the drive is at optimal
level. I have only 512MB of RAM. In Task Manager, my CPU activity is
always low even though the hard drive is thrashing about. How can I tell
what program is hitting the drive?

Ctrl Alt Del and Task Manager might help. Click on the gray CPU column
header to sort by CPU usage.

Anti Virus and Windows Defender might be scanning, if you have defender
remember it's a Beta version and has a problem currently with activity that
occurs apparently at random.

If not something you can discover this way see this page and get "Autoruns"
to see what might be on the system you don't know about, it could be
malicious.
http://www.sysinternals.com/SystemInformationUtilities.html

Also, if this starts after a period in inactivity, it might be the indexing
service which I think most people turn off. Frankly it doesn't appear to me
to do anything very useful.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/indexsrv/html/ixintro_03l1.asp

Charlie