I just got a new PC with Windows Vista home premium. The hard drive seems to
be running allot. Is this normal for Vista?
Normal, yes, appropriate or useful, no!
This is likely indexing. One of Vista's dumbest and most poorly
implemented "features" that will constantly cause your hard drives to
trash around while not offering much in value.
In theory is should improve how fast search finds things. Since most
people rarely if ever do extensive searching for files on their system
all the effort is wasted. Most people disable indexing or limit it to
one partition.