funny hdd noise, swapping or thrashing

[vhelp]

i have a strange situation. tx two hurricane sandy our power is down for the week. i am running on 2hr netbooks. i charge at work and play at home. i am using a 12volt 500amp jumper as my power source, hooked up to a 50watt inverter to connect my DSL power (7watt) to it. i can run for hours on a full charge. great. in fact, i just picked up another 500amp jump starter for the 30 watt bult in my living room so i can see what i'm typing here on this tiny netbook. so, i am officially off the grid, so to speak and on solar energy, sort of. ok. anyway.

so now that that is out in the open.. i have the strange problem i didn't realize before.

because theres no power in our building, it is very quiet. i can hear my heart beat. thats a first. anyway. so, to my problem....i am hearing a chirping sound from my netbooks hdd. and i come to realize that it is eating my battery. that hdd is gridding every 1 to 1.5 sec intervals. i don't know what is causing it. i have kaspersky virus on it but its licience ran out and it too deactivtes. but it is still running some tasks in the background and it might be causing the issue but i'm not sure. so i exited out of kaspersky and it is still doing it. it goes on and off, pausing every so often.

so, i thought, maybe if i install some randisk, perhaps that will alleviate the hdd thrashing and extend my battery life a little longer. can anyone skilled in ramdisk area help me by suggesting a clean d/l and setup for this rig:

xp pro, 500mb ram netbook ?

thank you.

[hello_hello]

If something's keeping the hard drive busy it's probably using the CPU at least a little too. Have a look in Task Manager to see what's running and if anything's using the CPU. Maybe kill any unnecessary processes to see if the noise stops. If you stop a process which causes problems because it's not running, just reboot.

[vhelp]

ok, i think i found the cause. opera. it is sending (caching? ) to the hdd. even if i only have one tab open, it is intervally thrashing to the hdd. but what ? i looked in the cache folder and the files are the same and no new ones except for when i browse another page, etc. i even turned off scripts but that does nothing. so, it looks like i need to find another non-bloating browser. maybe chrome in this case will work for me on the netbook of this ram size. it has tabs and no bells/whistles (bloatable) that i could see so far, on my xp home computer.

[Joe The Dude]

ok, i think i found the cause. opera. it is sending (caching? ) to the hdd. even if i only have one tab open, it is intervally thrashing to the hdd. but what ? i looked in the cache folder and the files are the same and no new ones except for when i browse another page, etc. i even turned off scripts but that does nothing. so, it looks like i need to find another non-bloating browser. maybe chrome in this case will work for me on the netbook of this ram size. it has tabs and no bells/whistles (bloatable) that i could see so far, on my xp home computer.

I was going to suggest turning off indexing; but I'm glad ya found the problem, even tho it was something else.

--- How to turn off Indexing on a HDD in XP ---
Open My Computer, right-click on a HDD, choose Properties.
The Indexing option is on the first page at the bottom.
Remove the Check-mark.