Vista Hard Drive

Hello

Im hoping somone can help me diagnose a problem with Windows Vista and a thrashing hard drive. Even when the computer is idle I can see the hard drive is still running and it takes forever to run a program. I understand I need to upgrade the ram as there is only 1Gb at the moment but that dosent explain why the hard drive is still running when the computer is idle because the memory usage is on average 70%, so the page file shouldnt be used at this point should it?

I have stoped all the major resource hungry services as follows:

Superfetch
Windows Defender
Windows search
System Protection

This has sped things up alot but the hard drive is still running when the computer is idle.

Any advise on what I can do to diagnose the problem further would be much apreciated.

 

My first suggestion would be to check for a scheduled defrag set to run when idle. If the drive is running low on free space, it might take a long time to finish. The only way to effectively modify many Scheduled Tasks in Vista is from the default Administrator account which should be accessible from Safe Mode.

I'd turn Superfetch and System Protection back on. Defender can be useful too

Can you open the Resource Monitor to find the cause of the activity? Start > Run > resmon > Enter.

 

Define "thrashing".
Is it making a lot of clunking, grinding noises?
If so, it my be getting ready to fail on you.

 

thrashing = Drive is running very fast as if loading a program or transfering files etc when it isnt.

The drive itself sounds healthy