Hard drive always polled

I recently bought a new computer with xp which is new to me. I have noticed that the hard drive led binks constantly about every 3 to 4 seconds even when no program is running , no mouse movement, its just sitting there. Is this normal or is there something going on that I should know about. I installed norton anti virus before I went on the internet and have auto update enabled. I tried disabling norton and t made no difference. Any help , advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

I'm sitting here watching my XP box, and yeah every few seconds the hard disk LED goes on for a millisecond.. this is not slowing down your machine is it ? Its not as if its paging to disk every three or four seconds right ? The light literally just goes on, and then goes off.. in the blink of an eye (LED ? )

Just remember.. there is no such thing as 'no program running'. If your machine is on, lots of programs are running.. even if you dont have one of your applications open in front of you. You can press ctrl+shift+esc to open task manager and view the processes that are running on your machine.. see if any are taking up a lot of resources.

Cheers,

Thanks for the info. One other point I forgot to mention is I have a router and I notice every 15-30 seconds the leds flash on the local network of the router but there is no activity on my cable modem-this happens when I am not logged onto the internet. It seems as if there is some communication going o between the NIC card and the router on a regular basis. I ran task manager and noticed whenever this happened the performance monitor spiked. I have tried unplugging the cable modem --no diff. Anyway judging by your response it has something to do with xp.

Later

Hmm not sure what that is, though most likely its windows doing its horrible NetBIOS broadcasts.. fire up a packet sniffer (My favourite is Ethereal ( www.ethereal.com/ ), Chris will recommend Iris which is also really good).Run the sniffer and dont generate any network activity.. after a while you should see some broadcasts going out of your machine.. these are what are causing that LED to blink.

If you notice, when you first boot your system, there will be a flurry of broadcasts as all windows boxen announce their presence to the world on startup. If you want to know exactly what its sending out, lemme know and I'll post you the links to a couple of little programs I wrote that will help you decode the NetBIOS junk.

Hope that helps

It could also have to do with browsing.

Every 12 minutes or so servers announce themselves to the network so that the machine that handles the master browse list can keep it updated. After a time if a server doesn't announce itself, it will be taken off the browse list.

Thanks for the info Sahir. Yes I would be interested in the programs regarding netbios. Anything to wrest a little control from Bill!!