Vista hard drive help program?

[deltatango]

I have an Acer which runs Vista Home premium 32bit and its hard drive light is very active during the early stages, I know Vista is an over bloated lump, if it was an older system I would think lack of memory. It is blessed with 2Gb (I know a bit low by todays standard) which I will increase.

Can anyone tell me of a good freeware program which could show me what is running other than svchost.exe (lots of 'em) etc so I can sort out what is what. Vista is a bit of an enigma to me.

Many thanks from David

[Murf]

Could be programs running in the background. Start | Run type in

msconfig

Look at the Start-Up Tab for programs that start with windows and run in the background, most do not need to start with windows.

Hard Drive activity could also be indexing...