My windows (XP) hard drive grinds a lot and it negatively affects the performance of other applications.
I have plenty of RAM and have already verified that this hard drive activity is not page file swap activity. I have also already looked in task manager to see if only one or two processes are active but I have found no smoking gun.
What tools can I use to directly determine what application or feature of the OS is causing the hard drive activity?
Solution:
Process Explorer. Make sure you show the columns that contain the I/O activity.
Sometimes you may see a process running multiple services that causes the activity. In that case, it requires a bit of guesswork.