Is there a way to tell what program in your personal computer made the hard drive run for 5 or 10 seconds.
It shows up in the task manager as cpu usage but not what caused it.
Administrator tools in the Control Panel. I don't use Xp anymore. But there are all kinds of tools and logs there. You should be able to setup a custom log that would keep track of the hdd access. Next time something takes a long time to use hdd, note the time and date, you should be able to go back to the log and see what was going on with the hdd.