Disk Contention Issues

[mnewsome]

Working with a netbook with 1Gh Processor and 1 Gb memory Only some supportive software such as adobe reader, flash AVG anti virus, malware, etc. The hard drive is 60% free and regularly maintained with diskclean and defrag

I find the drive light is on or rapidly flashing much more than normal and I find a significant amount of latency with the keyboard and mouse. Want to use the tools to determine precisely what is occupying the harddrive

Using services.msc services such as smartcard, themes, and zune services

Screenshots of activity are posted to Windows live screenshots at https://cid-63220807a7f4accb.photos.live.com/browse.aspx/XP%20Performance?nl=1&uc=1

Looking for specific guidance on how to identify and reduce disk contention

[rch1231]

I would run malwarebytes (download from cnet's download.com) and see if anything has got onto your system. Then take a look in task manager at the processes tab to see processes that are running and sort them by the CPU time(click the CPU heading twice) to see what is taking up all of the processor time at the top. Make sure you have the option to see processes from all users at the bottom checked.

[mnewsome]

Much thanks for your timely reply. I already recorded and researched each of the proccesses. All were appropriate and only two could be stopped without fallout. There must be something going on that retards the action of my mouse and delays typed entries on internet site input boxes. Also know that malware bytes has been clean since I bought the machine.

[rch1231]

Have you tried hijackthis to see what it shows?

[mnewsome]

I don't think the answer lies in more software. I have webroot, AVG, Defender,etc. Reports show only tracking cookies which are routinely removed. What I am looking for is how one can drill down into the machine to find what is the nature of the hard drive activity. There are supposed to be ways to use the OS monitoring tools to set parameters. This is the path in which I seek guidance