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Charlie
I have a problem that has haunted my computer for a couple of years now. If/when I suffer a power loss at home and my computer goes down unexpectedly, this problem is most likely to occur. When I power the thing back up, it seems to be fine but if I let it sit idle for an hour or so, the hard drive starts running full blast and it won't stop. It brings everything to a halt and even if I try to open a program or a webpage, it takes several minutes. I have had task manager open when this lockup occurs and the CPU shows to be doing little or nothing. The hard drive light doesn't flicker like during startup, it's on solid. The only thing I can do to stop it is a hard reboot. This problem eventually works itself out after a few days or a couple of weeks...until the power goes out again. I have ran two different anti-virus', spyware, and come up with nothing. None of the processes in the task manager seem to be out of the ordinary. I have tried to defrag but Windows says it is not needed at this time. If I try to defrag anyway, it locks up after a while, hard drive spinning way. I'm not too techie so the fix needs to be simple, or give me a way to stop the HD without rebooting.