I am running a dell system with XP 512 Ram and i think an 80 gig harddrive that seems to be grinding it self to death. tried closing all programs and just letting it idle and it still seems to never stop. This is starting to worry me because this computer is a year old and my old one like four years has never run this slow or made this much noise. Any ideas on what may be causing this are appreciated.

I dont know if this has anythig to do with it but when I log off or shut down there are a few programs that are not responding and must be forcefully shut down. I will ad a post later with a list of those programs