hard drive churn

[carol]

Hi . My daughter's PC is a Dell Dimension DM051 with P4, 3GHz, 512 RAM running XP-sp2. On boot the hard drive churns for around 15 minutes before settling down. It never uses 100% of the processor but it does slow the PC down considerably. I checked to see if AVG is set to scan on boot but it isn't. Could somebody explain what is going on and suggest what we can do stop it?

[Psymon]

Is the hard drive close to being full?

[liljim]

Im thinking a good defrag from safe mode will help some. Its going to take forever so i suggest starting it at night and going to bed, should be done by morning.

[carol]

We found the culprit ~ Ad-Aware ! It was doing a scan on boot. However, we could find no way to turn it off and a search revealed this was a problem with the latest versions. I un-installed and the churn reduced considerably because AVG update was also kicking in on boot. There doesn't seem to be a way of stopping that either! Any help with this appreciated.