hard drive is constantly running

It seems as if my hard drive on my compaq presario v2000 is constantly running which causes programs that I use to run slow. I have windows xp and I have tried several things (help troubleshooter, hp total care) but nothing solves the problem. I think I just have too many programs running at the same time but I don't know how to address this situation without screwing anything else up. I also am running a version of microsoft office that lets just say..I didn't pay for. Some of the other programs that I have are BearShare, zip forms (for Realtors), norton anti virus, webroot spy sweeper and Itunes. I have also downloaded 4 disk clean and big fix from the major geeks website hoping they would have identified the problem but they were unsuccessful. Does anyone know what the problem is?

 

Use task manager to identify the programs that are running. You should see one that has high cpu usage.

 

My hard drive seems like it is constantly running causing whatever programs that I try to run to perform very slowly. I have windows XP installed. I ran task manager and the System Idle Process is using up a lot of the CPU space. There are also about 11 other processes on the task manager that use more than 10,000 memory. I have a version of office on my computer that well, I didn't really pay for. I've tried various programs to try and troubleshoot the problem but nothing has worked. How do I diagnose this problem? How do I fix whats wrong?