Every couple of minutes or so, my PC accesses the hard disk. I do not know where to look to stop it, eg BIOS, XP Home etc. Dr Henry Chandler
The usual culprits are desktop search utilities, virus checkers, hard drive optimisers and similar tools that perform background tasks when the PC is not being used for something else. Unfortunately, it might also be an advertising program fetching more pop-ups or a Trojan doing something nefarious, so you're wise to watch for this sort of thing.
Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Windows Task Manager, click on Processes and that will show you what background processes your PC is running -- or, better still, download SysInternals' Process Explorer* from www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html. The culprit may well be the Microsoft Indexing Service, cisvc.exe.
If you need to look something up, the Elder Geek website has a guide to the most common services (www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm).
* Microsoft likes this, too -- it bought the company.
