I have a dell desktop. About 3 months ago the hard drive died so dell sent me a new one. The original hard drive was a model branded as silent. And it really was. Well, this new hard drive is far from silent. Sometimes it will be very quiet, but most of the time it sounds like its constantly writing to the drive and I cant figure out why. When I put it into sleep mode, it sounds like its writing. If im on the desktop trying to decide what Im going to do, it sounds like its writing.

Can anyone explain why this is? Im using Vista for my OS. Not sure if this will help but here are my system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 5000+
2.5GB Ram
500GB Hard Drive. I believe its a Seagate.
Onboard video

I dont really know what else I should say. If anyone can answer this for me I would be really grateful.

Thank you.

Hello and welcome to PC Help Forum.

Are you sure it sound like it is writing and not clicking?

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It is all in the hardware..........................................
Sources:
http://www.microsoft.com/en/gb/default.aspx
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/Home/
http://www.petri.co.il/index.htm

PCHF Rules Scan Computer for Driver Updates Pre-Work

do you have any defrag programs that run when idle or a antivirus set to scan while idle? press ctrl alt and del together and click processes see whats running at the time

No defrag programs but I had a spybot program running. I stopped that since I have other protection. There was also some program that appeared to constantly look for changes in my media folders. It appears to have been installed when I installed Roxio on my PC. I removed those from the running tasks and the problem seemed to stop.. Thanks for the suggestion. Hopefully those were the only things causing this.

looks like it was mate