Do you have conky installed?
Code:
sudo apt-get install conky
See which processes/applications are using up the most system resources.
Also, when the hard drive is spinning (unnecessarily) can you post the output of top?
Code:
top - 08:46:34 up 49 min, 2 users, load average: 0.18, 0.39, 0.44
Tasks: 103 total, 1 running, 102 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 13.3%us, 7.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 79.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.7%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 515580k total, 498168k used, 17412k free, 22156k buffers
Swap: 489940k total, 0k used, 489940k free, 253580k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5289 root 20 0 46328 21m 8040 S 10.0 4.3 4:39.64 Xorg
5931 jaredozv 20 0 193m 76m 25m S 4.0 15.1 3:47.75 firefox
5984 jaredozv 20 0 82836 20m 10m S 2.7 4.0 0:01.94 gnome-terminal
5170 root 20 0 3420 1220 1068 S 0.7 0.2 0:01.34 hald-addon-stor
5585 jaredozv 20 0 11084 4856 2612 S 0.7 0.9 0:00.58 pulseaudio
6096 jaredozv 20 0 2308 1104 852 R 0.7 0.2 0:00.04 top
1 root 20 0 2844 1692 544 S 0.0 0.3 0:01.84 init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 ksoftirqd/0
5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
6 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.16 events/0
7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 khelper
41 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.26 kblockd/0
44 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
45 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_notify
106 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 kseriod
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