How to know which app causes harddrive light to keep flashing?

[calmius]

just got a new laptop so I am still figuring this out. I have been using XP until this point, which was on PCs put together by me. The laptop is Toshiba. Mostly there are no problems. But sometimes when I turn it on the hard drive light keeps flickering to show activity. I checked "current processes" list and there weren't any taht looked unknown or which took up too much cpu power.

So, waht could it be? is there anything to be concerned about? how can I check?

[shadowpr]

It could be your anti-virus if you have one running in the background.

[kilgoretrout]

That's probably vista itself. Vista caches a lot of things from the hard drive to ram when it first starts up to increase performance by cutting down on disk reads and reading directly from ram. This means a lot of disk reads when you first start vista. That's one reason vista is so sluggish when it first starts up and seems to get better as you run it. There's also a lot of disk reads from vista's search function which I believe can be turned off. Not sure how to do that, however but I recall the issue being covered in other threads on this board.