Hard Drive Access

[#1]

Can anyone offer advice, I am all out of ideas. I have a toshiba laptop, with a celeron 2.5Ghz CPU, and 768Mb of RAM. just recently, when browsing the Web, at random times, the hard drive is getting accessed alot for approx 30 or so seconds, and then back to normal. Not doing anything but surfing.  I use Firefox3 at the mo. Changed back to using Windows page filing, rather than my own settings, to see if that was the issue, no joy. Scanned for Spyware and Viruses (AVG8, Adaware and Super antispyware), nothing came up. Check Task mamger when this is happening, nothing seems out of the ordinary, System idle using most of the processor time.  Cannot think what may be causing this. HDD is only quarter full. Anyone any other ideas as to what may be causing this issue???

[#2]

Could be
You have a lot of applications open and running short of memory.( if you just closed some it could be writing back to disk)
You have write cache set on the disk so when its gets a free moment windows writes data to the drive.
AV scanning webpages if they have javascipt etc on them.
Any defrag software running?
It is fairly normal as windows has a mind of its own.
If you are concerned download Filemon free from
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896642.aspx
This will show you whats going on

[#3]

Thanks Samuria....
I suspect now its AVG8, which I have recently installed from V7.5.  I disabled as much as I can automatic updates at 19:00hrs, and it was also set to build a new system restore point after each update, which I have switched off. Also told it not to do daily logs.  Seems a bit better, but will need some time to check it though.

[#4]

I also get this quite frequently too. Think I'll try that idea of turning off caching..