Any help would be appreciated. Over the past two months my PC had been slowing down and locking/freezing fairly often. The main symton is that the hard drive seems to be constantly in use and 'whirring' with the light flashing. Also, when checking how much room is left on the Hard drive through Windows explorer, the figures changes a lot, one min it may say 8 GB free, the next only 3Gb free. I have tried all manner of things which include:

1/Defrag - eventually got this going after closing all other programs in the system tray. This program still had to keep restarting though as a message saying the information on the hard drive had changed kept appearing

2/ Disk cleanup, again, this worked eventually but kept restarting saying that something was writing to the drive.

3/ Set my AV to only scan upon sending and receiving emails.

4/ cleared lots of stuff of my Hard drive

5/ uninstalled a couple of programs such as Kazaa which I thought may be causing it.

So essentially, I seem to have an overactive hard drive but cannot figure out what it is doing all the time. Does this sound odd or is it a classic sympton of impending disaster perhaps.....?? All comments appreciated. Ta.

PC is an HP Pavilion 8770. Win ME

Regards

JimboP

How much system memory (RAM) do you have in your PC? If you are running out of RAM, Windows will create a temporary memory file on your hard disk called "virtual memory". It keeps reading from this and writing to it, causing lots of hard disk activity, which is extremely slow in comparison to how fast it can read/write to RAM memory. This is one of the biggest reasons to get a memory upgrade.

This might not be your problem but it certainly sounds possible. If you're not sure how much RAM you've got, right-click the My Computer icon on your desktop and go to Properties. At the bottom of that window that opens, there will be a memory figure in Kb, e.g. 132,000Kb.

If it's not that, it could be a virus or spyware problem. Let's hope it's not.

As for the fact that you say it's changing the amount of free space from 3Gb to 8Gb ...... erm ...... I've got no explanation for that at all apart from the hard disk having some serious errors on it, which Scandisk might be able to sort out.

Many thanks......after some more messing, i'm pretty sure its my AV software, which I have reintsalled and re-setup. Seems to be a bit better now.

J