Every second or so the computer hard disk is accessed, making a ‘clock-clock’ sound with the hard-drive light blinking twice. During the day, the noise is almost unnoticeable but at night it is distracting and stressful. This seems to happen constantly, even when my only interaction with the computer is reading text on screen. I noticed the rattle since the very first time I used Windows XP, which came pre-installed together with some utility and other programs provided by IBM. I suspect that something requires a read/write cycle to the disk every second in order to function. The computer is an IBM ThinkCentre A50p Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 512 MB of memory, running Windows XP Home Edition.

It is unlikely that a program requires a read/write cycle to the hard drive every second, as this would be very poorly written software! More likely, the problem is hardware related. However, we should check all scenarios before proceeding. To test whether this is a software or hardware issue, we need to boot the computer to a DOS prompt. This ensures that absolutely nothing is running in the background. Firstly, create a DOS boot disk. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘My Computer’. Place a blank floppy disk in the disk drive. Right-click on the floppy drive and click ‘Format’ from the context menu. Under the ‘Format Options’ tick ‘Create an MS-DOS Startup Disk’. Click ‘Start’. Once the start-up disk has been created, reboot your computer with the disk in the floppy drive. The computer should boot to an A:> prompt. Check if the hard drive accessing continues. If it does, you have a hardware problem and should consult IBM, possibly for a hard drive replacement, or another remedy action.

On the other hand, if the problem ceases then it seems to be a software problem. In this case, remove the boot disk from the drive and reboot the computer (it will boot to Windows like normal). Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes) and click OK. In the window that appears, click the ‘Startup’ tab. You will see a list of all programs which load on startup. Untick all non-essential applications to avoid them loading on startup. Generally, the only essential application which you should not untick is RUNDLL. Reboot your computer. When Windows loads if the problem has ceased then it is caused by one of the applications Windows loads on startup. Go back into msconfig and tick one startup item, then reboot, then see if the problem resurfaces. This will help in narrowing down the problem application. On the other hand, if the problem continues then it seems that Windows could be causing the problem. In particular, Windows XP or Office XP could be conducting indexing operations. To disable hard drive indexing in Windows XP, go to ‘My Computer’ and right-click on your hard drive. In the window that appears, click the ‘General’ tab. Then untick ‘Allowing Indexing Service to index this disk’¦’. Click OK. Also, if you have Office XP installed, have a look at support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q282/1/06.asp for instructions on how to disable the Office Indexing Service.

If all else fails, try starting Windows in Safe Mode to see if the problem persists (as in Safe Mode there should be no non-essential applications/drivers running). To do this, just before the Windows XP splash screen appears when your computer starts, press F8 and select ‘Safe Mode’ from the menu which appears. If the problem persists in Safe Mode then you may need to reinstall Windows. On the other hand, if the problem ceases then please contact me again for further instruction.