Windows XP Running Slow

I have seen this Topic posted before and have read through everything their was to say but it hasnt helped my problem. So if anybody can help it would be most appreciated and I apologise for starting a topic has been posted before. Initially I had complained that Nero was running slow (see my previous post) but this isnt the root of my problem.
My system as it stands:
ASRockK7VT4APro, 256DDR Ram, AMD 2000+Processor, Radeon 7000 series 64MB Graphics card, 2 x Hard Drives (Master and Slave), 2 x Dvd Drives one burner.

I have ran various Anti Virus scans and my system is clean. I have ran Adaware and Spybot and I have Microsoft's own Spyware program installed and all is ok. The trouble I seem to be having is the access time on my hardrive. It is like it is constantly using the page file ( my guess ?? ). Access time on the hard drives seems to be very slow and even now while I am typing this and nothing really is running my hard drive is constantly blinking on and off (perhaps this is normal?). The way I have the harddrives setup is my 20GB is set to Master and my 80 GB is setup as slave ( I did read in another topic that perhaps I should have this jumper as cable select ). The make of the drives is as follows 20 GB - Quantum Fireball LCT 20 and the 80 GB - Hitachi HDS722580VLAT20. The Hitachi is a little newer than the Quantum so could they both be fighting each other in some way? I have a memory management tool running at the moment and I am standing at 45% free memory but it takes a good 5 seconds for the conrol panel to load up. I do seem to have a lot of processes running however when I run msconfig - 33 in total.
Hope somebody can help.

Chris