Hard Drive accessing

[ksoth]

I have a problem with my hard drive accessing causing major system slowdown in pretty much everything. Every once in awhile, it'll just start accessing causing horrible frame rates in games (of all types). Now, I just recently discovered it is accessing, not because the light was coming on but because I felt it on the floor when the computer was performing particularly horrible. Does anyone have any idea why the HD is doing this? Here are my system specs:

Duron 700 OCed to 750
MSI k7T Pro mobo
128 MB PC133
IBM 13 gig 7200 RPM ATA66 HD
Geforce 256 DDR video (latest 6.50 drivers)
Windows ME


Everyhtings pretty standard... Now, recently I changed the Virtual Memory to a permanent 150 MB swap file as directed by something I read on the subject. That obviously didn't help. Here's a list of stuff that's runninh in the background on the system (by hitting CTRL ALT DEL):

Explorer
Findfast
Em_exec
Osa
Systray
Promon
Lexpps
Cd_load

I'm not sure what everything does. Lexpps is printer (but it happened before this was even installed). Could one of these progs be what's causing the horrible system slowdowns I am experiencing? Thanks for any help.

 

[Guest]

All you really need to be running is Explorer and Systray, try turning off one at a time and see if they make a difference, generally if you get a lot of activity happening on your hdd when you are not doing much means that the hdd is on the way out, how old is it?

 

[Lucol]

You can definitely get rid of Findfast and Osa, these just eat up RAM and Findfast every so often looks throughout your harddrive looking for Office files. You can find these in the Startup menu. Since you have Win Me, you might also want to disable System Restore, this also has a pretty negative impact on performance and it also eats up your drive space, little by little.

 

[ksoth]

It's only like 5-6 months old, so it is fairly new... I'll try getting rid of stuff and see if it keeps happening. Thanks.