HDD will not stay idle

whs said:

Go to Services and disable Windows Event Log and see whether that improves the situation.

To do this, you will probably have to log into Safe Mode. When I tested it at normal desktop, it gave me an Access Denied error. I'm not certain this will solve your problem, but it did seem to slow down harddrive activity some, but it slowed down CPU activity more. I think that with this disabled it is the first time that I have ever seen CPU activity occassionally at 0%. It might also make it easier to see what is left running, because mousing over Process Explorer, I see processes that had been hidden previously.

I don't know how good of an idea it is to keep Windows Event Log disabled, because it is a very good diagnostic tool. However, I'm guessing that Windows will continued to produce minidump as necessary, and if so, I guess one could get by without it.

One of the processes that recurs a lot is the Desktop Windows Manager (DWM.exe), which controls certain aspects of how the desktop is displayed, like Aero, so is likely to be the cause of slideshow.ini running. You could disable this in services, if you could tolerate the basic theme.

The best strategy would be to replace the HDD by an SSD. Then you would have a lot less power consumption - and less heat too.

whs said:

The best strategy would be to replace the HDD by an SSD. Then you would have a lot less power consumption - and less heat too.

This would be an excellent idea, if he wouldn't mind downsizing from 320GBs to 30-40GBs due to the cost factor...or he has pockets deep enough to afford a larger drive, but considering the fact that he is a student, that isn't too likely, unless he has a silver spoon in his mouth.

I would be willing to buy a miniPCIe SDD if my ThinkPad BIOS supported booting from it

foreversilent004 said:

I would be willing to buy a miniPCIe SDD if my ThinkPad BIOS supported booting from it

If your PC can boot from Sata, then it can boot from an SSD. Here is a good deal of the day: Newegg.com - DANE-ELEC DA-SDM25-80G-N-T-MK 1.8" with 2.5" adapter SSD Migration Kit - SSD
I just ordered my second one. The first one is running Windows7 - really fast.