Hard Drive Constantly Accessed - Advice, please!

[JOBE]

The light to my hard drive is flashing (very briefly) intermittently, even when I'm just on the desktop. It does this every few seconds - although it sometimes goes for much longer without flashing. I'm concerned about the effect this could be having on the performance of my machine. I'm running XP.

I thought Norton Internet Security might be causing it, but it still does it with all the Norton options turned off. When I check Windows Task Manager, I have 41 processes running when the system is "idle" - I'm really not sure which ones I can turn off.

Could someone please tell me if this is normal - I'm concerned I might have a faulty drive. The drive has a SATA RAID controller - I'm not sure if this makes any difference. I would be very grateful for any advice!

Quad 6600
4 Gig Ram
8800 GTX
1,500 Gig Hard Drive with SATA RAID Controller
X-Fi Surround Sound

<> JOBE.

[Skuzzy]

Itis not unusual to have a blip of HD activity every few seconds, but 41 processes is a bit high.

Might want to read this.  Hope it helps.

[JOBE]

Many thanks for the advice, Skuzzy - I'll check that list out.

<> JOBE.

[Bino]

Are you running the Indexing Service?  That goes out to the hard drive periodically to maintain an index of your files, so it can open them more quickly the next time around.  It also eats up a bit of CPU while it waits for disk I/O to complete.