Hard Drive light stays on as if still running something

Here are my system specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad 8200
Gigabyte EP43-UD3L mobo
2GB DDR2 Corsair memory sticks
WD 160 GB SATA HD
EVGA GeForce GTX 285 1GB with GPU
Apevia 680w PSU and P4 12v ATX adaptor for CPU
Sony DVD Drive and CD ROM that are on the same IDE cable but jumpers might be wrong

Lately my dard drive light has been on and stays on and at times browsing on IE seems sluggish. I have installed the graphics drivers I think, but still seems sluggish, in fact, I don't even know if the graphics card is even working correctly. I've been having to do a lot of ironing out work since I installed Windows 7 RC Build 7100. I updated Windows and I tried again thinking it didnt update but the Windows Update window would just hang there with a blank page. I updated earlier from the windows update site though so I may not need it.

If your hard drive light is solid, that is usually an indication of 1 or 2 things:

1 (unlikely)- The wires for the HDD light on the system board are not properly connected thus leaving the light on all the time.

2 (more likely)- There is a process/application running in the background and you need to determine what it is.

Best way to figure it out is to open the task manager and sort the processes from highest to lowest to see what is hogging up the CPU time. Might not hurt to sort out the amount of memory as well to see which process is using the most.

Thanks Mike, I will check now. Oh, you mention HDD light on board,....the HD is connected using the SATA connection cable. And I had checked earlier what processes were running, It says several things are runing in Applications, like IE, Firefox, Windows Live, etc. But in Processes nothing in the CPU are running and all numbers are at 00.

Hello,

Try looking at the memory usage, not the CPU, click on the heading to bring the apps taking up most of the memory usage.

Ok so far I did that and i found like 3 to 4 Iexplorer running, one that was using at least 44k memory so i shut it down, so far the light has shut and stays off with a little flickering here and there.


Ok, now its back on.

I should have read the last post. My bad.

Could still apply to others though.... so read on
There is also the HDD cable, not sata cable taht goes from the pins on the board to the lights on the front, if those are backwards (positive on neg and vice versa) can cause this problem also. May not be in your case, but if you can't find anything through Taskman, then i would look there. Personally I would look there first as it is quicker to determine and may fix your problem in about 5 min, if that is indeed the problem. Then resume further troubleshooting.

Ok, I will check that too. I did however connect the SATA cable with the L end or the end that was bigger, to the HDD and the smaller one to the motherboard. So I switch it around? I wonder if it also has to do with my HDD LED connection hmm.

HDD LED is what I was referring to.

Sata cables are universal, they are keyed at both ends the same, so it doens't matter which end goes to which side.

Thanks all, I have finally fixed the problem , and the hunch was mentioned earlier. I had both DVD and CD ROM drives on one IDE cable, which would have been ok, but I had one as Slave and the other SSC or something instead of Master, but I ended up taking off the CD ROM and sticking the DVD drive on the IDE plug closest to the motherboard and leaving the last one empty. No more hard drive light and computer runs much more smoother................so far