Vista is grinding my hard drive...

Built a new system:

Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel Q6600 w/ 2 GB DDR2 800 RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
80 GB Seagate 7200 rpm SATA
(6 GB+ Unused space in main drive)

Vista is constantly grinding my hard drive even though I'm not running anything in the background. When I start up, it'll grind continuously for 10 minutes. Then it'll stop, and a few minutes later it'll start grinding again for no reason. Task manager shows no application running, and CPU process is at 1% max. But hard drive is grinding away anyway. Whatever it's doing is apparently high priority, because if I attempt to run any program it ends up waiting for Vista to finish grinding away.

Any idea what the heck Vista is doing? If it's some kind of maintenance routine (ie indexing), why doesn't it show up in task manager? My gut feeling is that Vista is constantly fetching and dumping stuff into a swap file. But with 2 GB of RAM and no programs running, I don't know why it'd do that. The last time I suffered through this much grinding was when I tried running Windows XP on an old celeron system with 256 MB RAM....

Might be the Indexing service. One way to check is to go to the Administrative Tools, then Reliability and Performance Monitor. You can check what is utilizing the Disk at that location.

Turn off System Restore - it is defaulted to run every 24 hours so when you turn your computer on it makes a restore point (and grinds hard disk).

Could also be the indexing service, but most likely system restore.