Recently I took my computer (P11-266) to the original supplier in for a zip drive to be installed. They experienced problems and decided that Windows 95 needed to be reloaded along with all other software and reformatted the disk. The hard drive light is now permanently on and the technician says he has experienced the problem a few times before but does not know what causes it but its not a problem. Is it and what is the cause? Also scandisk (standard option selected) takes a long time to run as it repeatedly restarts - the message is: Scandisk has restarted 10 times because windows or another program has been writing to the drive. Quitting some programs may enable Scandisk to finish sooner. The message repeats regularly eg 5 times in 35 minutes and the scan continues. Only Windows is running at the time. I believe the standard scan should take only a minute or two. What is wrong?

Your hard drive light being on permanently shouldn’t cause a problem, there is probably just a misconnection within the machine. The Scandisk problem and the message could be because; (i) Windows itself is writing to the disk (ii) Although it may look like there is no other program running there may be some that you cannot see running in the background. If Windows is doing an operation in the background then there is not much you can do. I recommend that you start Scandisk (but do not run it so it starts to scan disks for errors), and leave the computer idle for about 5min so Windows can finish what it is doing. If you think that there may be some programs running in the background then press ‘CTRL-ALT-DEL’ to see. If there are unnecessary programs, running click them in the list and press ‘End Task’ (be very careful though that you don’t close any vital Windows programs eg. Explorer)