Sometimes my hard drive light is flashing like crazy when I'm not running
anything. What is Vista doing behind my back? Task Manager shows nothing
running.
Rev. Jim? From Taxi?
MS feels it's OK to hide their processes when applicable from the rest
of the OS since mother knows best.
I'd vote for indexing being the culprit. You can shut off the indexing
service, it's a waste of system time. You can also install Agent
Ransack and dump Vista's POS search facility - but that's a feature
improvement, not a performance issue.
If Defrag is configured to run in the background, you can stop that
process too.
The other thing that Vista seems to do that thrashes the disk is the
creation of restore points. You won't find this running as a process
as it hides but it's out there running on occasionally.
Lastly, all Vista HD's seem to flash consistently every second or two
with unknown access. Just more MS hidden shenanigans I guess.