Hard Drive seems always busy, busy, busy

Hey guys,

I posted this also on Tomshardware.com as I'm trying to find a definite solution to my HDD issue. Hoping to find some potential solutions here as well.
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I've been noticing lately that my hard drive seem to always be busy processing. It doesn't matter what I do...it's as if something is working in the background. Now the only change was last month when my video card died and I replaced it with a new one (Radeon HD7750) but I don't see how it would related...or does it?

In any case, my computer isn't new. It's a Dell Dimension 9200. The current hard drive is the original: A 500gb Samsung HD501LG. I ran a whole bunch of different programs to check the disc such as HDTune and Active Smart and so on. All say drive is ok so I'm confused. The only message I received was from the Performance Monitor saying, "The average disk queue length is 2. The disk may be at its maximum transfer capacity due to throughput and disk seeks".

I had done a clean install about 4 months ago and not even half of what is currently on my HDD is back on as back then I realized I had too many games installed and didn't play them. Hence there is even less data on . Indexing is off, defrag is off. One thing I can point out is that some of the PC games I will play will make my HDD go berzerk (they didn't before) and some will literally freeze up and crash...some other will freeze for a good 10-15 seconds and then unfreeze.

This is for any application...even internet browsing through IE, FF and Chrome.

Any thoughts on the possible problem?

Specs:

Dell Dimension 9200
E6600 DuoCore 2.4ghz
Windows 7 (32bits)
500gb HDD
4gb ddr2 ram
Gigabyte Radeon 7750 - 1GB GDDR5 (Factory Overlocked 880mhz)

What, if anything, does the tab named Disk show within Resource Monitor show.

Or you can try Process Explorer.

Is this your primary hard drive? Does it have all your stuff installed on it (OS, applications, etc)? Do you see any processes or strange services that could be using all the resources up? Maybe Windows is trying to Index the hard drive contents.

I only have one drive that has everything on it...always had.

I did a diagnostic on my CPU just to make sure but that passed. The resource monitor shows the Disk graph going top to bottom, even filling the whole box green.

Look to the left of the graphs and see if you can tell which app is causing most of the activity.

Yeah it sounds like you just have an application that's not working properly.

I will look at this tonight. I also found an old card (GF 8400) to see if it's video card related...which I doubt but I'll try anything at this point.

Confirming the card has nothing to with this. The GF8400 made no difference at all. A few minutes I got a memory dump blue screen as well...a first since I got this computer. Starting to think the HDD could slowly dying...

Consider making a thread in this subforum:
BSOD Help and Support - Windows 7 Help Forums

Be sure to follow these posting instruction
Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions

Their analysis of your last bsod files might help find the root cause of this issue.