hard drive going bananas

[mr brightside]

Gents

I'm a complete IT numpty so any answers will need to be very basic.

Now, my hard drive has been working overtime, it sounds like the fans are whirring and whizzing about, the hard drive is clicking and clacking around (gosh don't i sound technical).

It's not particuarly overworked, the hard drive has been de-fragmented, i've removed a lot of unnecessary programs, but going from one page to another all hell brakes lose.

Any ideas anyone, sorry if i sound stupid.

Cheers

[bigdods]

Memory shortage causing windows to use virtual memory on the hard drive.

How much RAM do you have ? 1GB is about right for Windows XP and its cheap as chips

[ThePassenger]

In WinXP hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and flick through the tabs. See if anything is eating CPU & RAM.

If it's all of a sudden gone this way, I'd suggest getting the usual malware removals and if your using Norton/Symantec anti-virus products remove them; they freak out and do all manner of weird shuzbut seemingly at random (replace with nod32/AVG-Free/Avast!/Kaspersky... take your pick).