Excessive hard drive activity

I am running Windows XP Pro SP3 on my home pc. The system is old. I can see the hard drive light constantly remains on while using it. It keeps on flashing on idle mode but as I do anything it just remains on. I had seen on my friends pc when he does not use the system the hard drive light turns off. But in my case it just keeps on. I am having 2GB RAM and 160GB hard drive. And now stuck with an weird problem. It looks some suspicious application keeps on working in the background. I am not able to get a proper information on the same. How can I find and stop the application.

Go in Task Manager and then see what you find. If the system activity is high then go in processes and checkout the application consuming maximum amount of memory. Through this find which application is causing the disk usage. There can be virus in your system. It is correct that when your system is on idle mode the hard drive light does not blink much. It remains off. But if there is any kind of infection or virus in the pc you get this kind of problems.

There is a tiny application which you can use. It is called as Hijackthis. You can download and install this application in your pc. Hijackthis is a great tool for finding out running processes in your pc. You can then simply find the location also from where it is working. I had located ample of virus through this. It will be great if you scan your system under safe mode with some good antivirus also. This will be more appropriate to fix the issue.

Try to boot your system in safe mode and then run a full system scan. The issue usually occur due to antivirus tools. The antivirus simply keeps on working in the background which is a common cause of problem. It keeps on monitoring your system activity due to which you get the error. It is essential that you must simply check your system for threats and if that does not wokr then the only option left is to format your system and install xp back.

My problem is not a quickly flashing hard drive usage light but a hard dive light that locks on solid and does not blink at all. When this happens all Apps I am running stop responding until the hard drive goes back to normal usage displays. I ran the Process Explorer and it shows nothing really taking excessive CPU usage and Norton gives me excessive hard drive usage and numerous apps, like ccsvchst, aol, jqs.exe and on and on. I also ran numerous apps to fix registry errors along with other errors and still no help

May possibly you confirm your event viewer in manage (right click my computer for xp, not confident on vista) and inform me if whatever thing is there in System, similar to a series of errors right earlier than the time crash. If you do observe somewhat possibly will you post one or two of them. As well when you ultimately restart does it come back ok or do you comprise some errors at post? Basically long time ago I was facing this same problem. For me the onboard SATA controller was malfunctioning or damaged within several way. receiving a SATA controller card resolve the difficulty.