Recently installed a Linksys network adapter on desktop to catch signal from router. The adapter works, connects to internet, fine. But whenever the adapter is plugged in (to USB port) the hard drive light comes on and hard drive tries to find something, about once every second. Unplug adapter, it stops. When the adapter is installed on a different PC, it works there too but this continual HD seek does not occur (so it's not the adapter or its software, something about the PC.) What is the HD looking for and how can I stop it?

Here are few possibles to check, not very logical, but a least worth elimimating. Unknown hard drive activity. Right click an empty part of your desktop > Properties > Display Properties > Desktop > Customize Desktop > Desktop Items. Down the bottom of that screen, uncheck > Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days. =================================== Disable Indexing Services http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=1335 http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html Indexing services is a small program that hogs HUGE amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexing and updates lists of the files on your system, so you can search for them quickly, but it's completely unnecessary. To disable it, go to the Control Panel and click Add or Remove Programs. Click the Add/Remove Window Components. Simply untick the Indexing services and click Next! ================================= Go into "My Computer", right click on all your hard drive partitions one at a time, left click "Properties". Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching". Select "Apply changes to subfolders and files". If any files can not be updated select "Ignore All".

Performance monitor might help provide clues as to what is going on as well as task manager. It might be that the computer doesn't have a bios that exactly follows usb2.0 specs. Very few do and dell is well... Maybe it is trying to install it as a storage device. See if dell has a bios update that suggests any usb changes?