Windows 7: Hard drive won't stop rattling

Ever since installing Win 7. Often for 5 to 10 minutes. Thought it was Avast (from task manager processes), uninstalled Avast, still the thing won't stop except very ocassionally when I'm doing specific tasks. Is this normal (mem paging, etc)? I'm ready to go back to XP.

DLoad and run the diagnostics from the drive manuf. website...
Follow the instructions for creating a bootable CD.
Run the long test.
This will tell you if the drive can be trusted.

Thx. Good advice. I should have mentioned that I did that. I also should have mentioned that it's 32 bit. This is not a HD problem. It's something in O/S or other backgnd pgms that just keep writing (reading?) disk.
Physical mem usage is pinned at 51%. It seems like it's paging to an order of stupidity. BTW HD is rattling now. It (almost) never stops.
Computer is Dell Insp 600M, 2g mem. First attempt was to boost mem from 512M to 2g. I thought that was the problem but it's apparently not.

As i typed this, disk stopped, at 24% mem now. but it will go back up, believe me. Is this Win 7? Does it mem page to infinitum (compared to XP)?

So by rattling you mean accessing... not really rattling? Because then I'd expect the drive to explode soon. my physical memory is at 35%..

Looks like you have a 1.4ghz CPU, and a 30 gig HD

Windows 7 req's:

1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
1GB of main memory
16GB of available disk space
Support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
A DVD-R/W drive

So you should be ok... but I would expect the paging file to be small if its on a 30 gig HD making the OS rewrite it over and over. Try replacing that with a larger HD and I'd think your "rattling" problems will be gone.

"Because then I'd expect the drive to explode soon."
I wish it would just explode and get it over with. Then it would be quiet.

Yes my HD is only 40 parttitioned to 30 C +10 D. The C has 19 free. This is not enough? Is there a way to allocate page file size without physically changing the drive? This is an aging machine. Don't know if I can find a HD or if they even built bigger ones back then (5 years old?).

The HDD sizes (physical) haven't changed...
I just got a Seagate 500G for less than 50 Bucks U.S. so they are quite reasonable right now...
The easiest solution for your setup is if you add a new drive you can simply hook up the new one as a slave drive...then boot to the new drive manuf. FREE disk tools and "clone" your existing drive over to the new one.
Then when it finishes you simply power down...unhook the old drive and set the jumpers and cables on the new drive to master and power up...
Presto ! All your data programs and OS are there but with tons of breathing room...
After you check that all is running properly you can then hook up the old drive...format it and use it for storage.

Thanks I fixed it. Didn't need to change the HD. I just went into system advanced settings and turned off auto page size, set it to max (4095). No more rattling.

I'm curious why some of you wanted me to replace a drive with 19gB free to accommodate a 4gB file?

Ah, well its probably just the HD, some of them are very loud. The new ones have silent tech built right in, I never hear my 640g access anything, even when extracting or loading a game level with no speakers turned on.

As posted, noise reduction, not due to lack of space, and generally, a loud HD is on the way out, and this saves you some trouble before it crashes since smaller HD's are cheap.
Glad you found a solution for your problem.

Just preferences...i suggested it because storage is ridiculously cheap right now...
If you don't want a new drive no problem.

19G would last me thru next week maybe...