I have been given a laptop by the good folks at my company on which to do my work (Java development). I usually use eclipse as my primary development platform.

The laptop is a Dell D830 and runs Windows 7 - 32 bit. Although the processor supports a 64 bit instruction-set, licensing limits me to running the 32 bit OS.

The HDD is a WD1600BEVT (Western Digital).

I have noticed that my disk is always very slow.

Windows start up is usually pretty quick, however as soon as I log on, my disk light stays on and usually, the laptop takes about 4 minutes (after logging in -- immediately upon getting the prompt to press Ctrl + Alt + Del to log in) before it's usable.

Questions:

• Is this expected behavior?
• What can I do to examine the disk and determine the cause of the problem?
• What can I do to improve my disk's performance?
• Any optimizations you may be able to suggest?

Other Questions:

• Some have suggested running Process Monitor (from sysinternals), but how would i get the log since start up?
• Instead of trying to fix this myself, should I simply push this onto the system administrator?

Thanks all.