Slow surfing, Hard drive is constantly running

Hi Everyone,
I have the following problem. A few days ago my laptop started taking a really long time to access a web page. Seems like everything takes a long time just in the past few days. When I access a page my hard drive starts running and continutes to run for some time. If i look in the task manger it shows that the system is basicly idle but my hard drive is just running along, meanwhile my web page has to wait on the hard drive to finsh and then finally i get my web page. This only recently started and appears to happen on IE and Mozilla. If i surf another site the hard drive starts turning again and when it stops i get to see my page. Damn this waiting. Any ideas…????