I remember hearing a while back someone saying something about old HDDs
sticking?  I think a buddy of mine might be suffering from exactly this,
assuming of course it happens.  He has an old 340Mb in his 486-33 but if you
are working, and the HD isn't accessed for a while, it takes a second to do
anything when you need to use it.  I'll explain:  you are working in word,
there is no paging or other disk access happening, when you hit save (or
windows decides to eat the disk for whatever reason) the drive LED lights up,
and you can hear the drive making a sound like it's spinning up (but there is
NO power saving features on this PC whatsoever, so it isn't spun down). After
about 1 second, you can hear the read-write doohickey move and it works as
usual.  There are no other problems with this drive, no bad sectors, or other
oddities, it's just annoying to have to wait for the drive to unglue itself
every time it is accessed because the mouse and everything won't respond while
the disk doing this!

If I remember correctly, it is caused by magnetic buildup, and I think that
someone mentioned a fix.  Then again, it might be another on of those pesky
flashbacks!  Thanks for any suggestions!

Dan


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