Basically, my PC's HD is being accessed all the damn time even when nothing is supposed to be going on. By what or for what, I don't know. What I do know is it's annoying. Is there any way I can see which programs are doing this?

Are you using Vista?

Yeah that's propably it. Or you pc is a part of some botnet.

I use Filemon or Process Monitor for finding out what programs are doing what.

Quote from NotAnIllusion :

Is there any way I can see which programs are doing this?

Quote from Krane :

Process Monitor

Yep, Process Explorer is a powerful tool and this is one of the things it lets you do. Download it, run it then right click on the display header and click on "Select Columns". Then click on the "Process Performance" tab and check the "I/O Reads" and "I/O Writes" boxes. Then look for the process whose I/O Reads or I/O Writes is increasing. That will probably be what's accessing your HDD.

if you're on Vista, ctrl-alt-del and start the Task Manager, go to the 'Performance' tab and click 'Resource Manager' near the bottom.

This'll tell you what processes have been accessing the HD.

Thanks everyone, I'm sorted now

Yes, I'm using Vista. I didn't know of the Res Mon in Task Manager so I didn' t even look Ironically I have both of the Sysinternals tools on a CD somewhere, but I didn't think they'd show disk access.

You can disable the file indexing service if you like, that should reduce HD access a fair bit. Plus its crap.

Good point. Had this (p)os for a while and haven't turned anything off yet