Slowdowns when harddrive activity

[lapino]

I noticed lately that my Macbook Pro (late 2008) can get pretty slow because of hard drive activity. Strange this is, there seems to be quite a lot of activity from time to time even when I'm doing next to nothing (but surfing and mailing).

Any idea how I can diagnose/fix this? Or do I need more memory (got 2gb).

 

[spinnerlys]

You can use Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities) to see what process might hog up the CPU and also how much disk activity is going on there.
Most probably it will be Spotlight indexing or Quick Look scanning for preview purposes.

Don't forget to select "Show All Processes".