Hard Drive Working Away

[nickmurphy]

i'm running an amd athlon 64 with a 160 gig hard drive but the hard drive is constantly busy--it always seems to be whirring and grinding away and the hard drive light is always on--it sounds like it's busy all the time like the old compaq deskpro types i was running years ago--it's got a gig of ram so that should be enough, i'm running vista rtm 6000 though it was the same with xp--i don't seem to be getting any crashes or lockups and i've done a trojan hunt and that seems ok--could it be a bios setting or something like that?
any ideas appreciated

[Soulassassin]

I had this a while back and it turned out to be my virus checker doing a scheduled scan (takes ages).

[Violator]

Could be a virus scanner as mentioned. Try checking your memory usage next time it does it, see if your PageFile is getting thrashed.

[nickmurphy]

definitely not a virus checker and how would i check my memory usage?

[Violator]

definitely not a virus checker and how would i check my memory usage?

Go into Task Manager, Performance, that will tell you memory and PageFile usage.

[nickmurphy]

ok cheers, what's normal and what's not?