Keeping hard drive shut down

[Ray]

I have an old Dell laptop, running XP Pro, that I want to use just to
display photographs. To keep the noise down, I set the hard drive to
shut down after 1 minute.

Unfortunately, most of the many photo display programs I've tried are
unable to change pictures without the hard drive restarting. The JPEG
files reside on a compact flash card, as do the display programs and
the system page file, but for some reason the hard drive still spins up
when the picture changes.

The only program I've found that doesn't do this is the Windows picture
and fax viewer's slideshow mode, but I can't find any way to set the
time delay between changes.

The system has 128 meg of memory, with about half of it free, so I
wouldn't think a memory shortage would be the problem.

Suggestions, anyone?

 

[DL]

Unless they are very simple display apps, on installation they will have
placed files on your C drive and entries in the registry. C drive is
therefore being accessed, and in any case in using win you are accessing the
C drive

 

[Ray]

Unless they are very simple display apps, on installation they
will have placed files on your C drive and entries in the
registry. C drive is therefore being accessed, and in any case in
using win you are accessing the C drive

Most of the apps I've tried are simple screensavers which don't install
any DLLs or other components. Some use ini files, so they shouldn't
need to access the registry.

Oh well, I can probably live with it.