Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Calvin Powers <calvin AT cspowers.com>]

Greetings, 

Once again I find myself turning to the collective wisdom of Internetworkers. This time it has to do with my sister's latptop. 

She has a Thinkpad T43p laptop with wndows XP.  She says nothing seems to be obviously broken, it's just incredibly slow. She says the hard drive light stays on almost constantly and net browsing and e-mail downloading gets so slow that the machine is more or less locked up, but the hard drive light is constantly going.  She says that this problem has existed for a while but got noticeably worse when she upgraded to the latest MS Office and Outlook. 

She claims that her AV subscription is up to date and that scans have not found any problems. 

She is in Texas so I do not have access to the machine itself. But I looked it up online and the machine came with just 512Mb of memory. So I had her upgrade it to 2Gb and she says she can't tell that it has gotten any better. 

I also noted that the specs for this machine are just 366Mhz CPU, which I think is kinda slow by today's standards, but I can't think why that would cause the hard drive light to stay on constantly. 

She also says that if she shuts down all the programs, the machine will get to the state where the hard drive light is not on constantly, but it still flickers fairly continuously. 

Looking at the task manager, the CPU meter stays in the 12-15% range. She can't see any obvious trend in the process list in terms of one process taking more CPU time than another.  I had her do a netstat command and send me the results. While there were a couple of connections I could not explain, there were a fairly small number of internet connections active. (and the netowrk conection meter on the task manager) shows 0% usage or almost 0% usage when all known programs are shut down. 

I would gladly entertain any suggestions on things to check. But my main question for internetworkers is, "how can I determine what's causing the constant hard drive activity?" Also, are there any hard drive diagnostic tools she could run to determine if the hard drive is having trouble? 

Thanks In Advance, 
Calvin