Alan
For the curious as to what the disk drive is doing ...

www.sysinternals.com has a bunch of utilities (owned by Microsoft) FileMon
is particularly useful.

Michael

"Alan" <alan111@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:%23St7FNGYHHA.5044@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Hi,
> Not sure if this is anything to do with Vista or not.
> I bought a new Packard Bell machine from PC World in the UK about a month
> ago. The hard drive never stops working. Even as I'm typing this, the HD
> is going berserk as if I were number crunching for NASA.
> I can close all applications and leave it idle with nothing but the
> desktop showing and it will whir and buzz like crazy for about twenty five
> minutes before it begins to reduce its activity.
> Any ideas as to what could cause this? Apart from driving me mad listening
> to it, the drive will clearly not last long like this.
> I've e-mailed PC World a day or so ago, no reply. They want 75p per minute
> to get help so I'm not going down that road if I can avoid it.
> If anyone has any advice it will be much appreciated,
> Regards,
> Alan.
>