HD Churning

[dn]

Every now and then my hard drive starts going furiously,
and XP grinds to a halt while the HD does its thing - the
mouse pointer stops dead in its tracks and I'm unable to
switch applications or even bring up the task manager.
Eventually things return to normal and I can use XP again.

Twice in the past few weeks, XP has advised me that it's
increasing my virtual memory while this is happening.

Is this "normal" for XP? Are there any tweaks or fiddles
out there to deal with this?

I'm running on an older PC, a 450 mhz P2 with a circa-1999
20 meg Western Digital hard-drive, and 256 meg of memory.
I've defragged recently.

I'm thinking maybe I'm just a little challenged in the
horsepower area and it may be time to upgrade to a new PC.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance... Dave.

[Nick Burns]

Try turning off windows file indexing.

"dn" > wrote in message
...
> Every now and then my hard drive starts going furiously,
> and XP grinds to a halt while the HD does its thing - the
> mouse pointer stops dead in its tracks and I'm unable to
> switch applications or even bring up the task manager.
> Eventually things return to normal and I can use XP again.
>
> Twice in the past few weeks, XP has advised me that it's
> increasing my virtual memory while this is happening.
>
> Is this "normal" for XP? Are there any tweaks or fiddles
> out there to deal with this?
>
> I'm running on an older PC, a 450 mhz P2 with a circa-1999
> 20 meg Western Digital hard-drive, and 256 meg of memory.
> I've defragged recently.
>
> I'm thinking maybe I'm just a little challenged in the
> horsepower area and it may be time to upgrade to a new PC.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Thanks in advance... Dave.