Can't figure this one out... What's going on with WinXP?

[hongkongfever]

Just got a Dell Inspiron 6000. Here's the specs:

Pentium M 1.6ghz 2mb cache
512MB DDR2 400MHZ RAM
ATI Rage X300 128MB PCIe
Toshiba 40gb 5400rpm HD


I wiped the computer out and reinstalled a fresh copy of WinXP when I got it. Installed all the necessary drivers and such. Everything is running fine. That is until i start to play World of Warcraft.

After a fresh boot, WOW runs fine. Very fast and everything loads super duper. But after a period of time it starts to lag real bad. It lags everywhere and anywhere where it has to load. During the lag, I notice there is a lot of harddrive activity. To me it looks like WinXP is rigorously accessing the harddrive.

I've played with the swap file settings and no luck. I can't figure out if this is because my harddrive is just slow or is there a setting in WinXP I can mess around with.

 

[Dahak]

The biggest thing that ive seen that could cause hard drive activity is the indexing service that xp has to allow for faster searches, but it is only suppose to do it on idle. To turn it off and see if that is the problem, Right click My Computer -> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Services, Double Click on Indexing Service, Hit Stop, and set it to Manual for Startup Type.

See if that reduces the about of lag/hard drive activity