So I have had my iBook just under a week now, and I love it, I doubt that I'll ever go back to a PC. OS X is great, and when Yellow Dog catches up I can run Linux on here too. Anyway I do have one question. My hard drive is always making noise like it is active, and I am wondering if that is normal. It's just the read/write kind of noise, not the about to die type. It could be that all drives make this noise, and I never noticed it before, my Inspiron is pretty loud with all of the fans going most of the time. Anyway if someone knows what would be causing this, like some process that runs most of the time or something, I'd be interested in hearing what it is.

Might be something working in the background, like Sherlock's indexing (although this won't run unless Sherlock is open in OS X). Try running Process Viewer to see if there's anything running that might be accessing the disk all the time. p

I ran top from the terminal, and nothing jumped out at me, all seemed to be fairly normal stuff. So I thought about what I had changed recently, and why it didn't do this while when I booted into OS 9. So last night I got rid of the Office X test drive, and away went the noise. Then this morning while playing around I found the Microsoft Database Daemon in my startup, so I'm guessing that was the piece of Office causing the noise.

Heh heh heh. Lesson #1: if your computer is acting weird, throw out all Micro$haftware and try again. 9/10 times that cures it. p