Thanks for the suggestion. My problem so far is that once the system starts slowing down, my ability to call up any monitoring program is gone. Once I got the Task manager program up and it showed, "Task Manager not responding"...:-( When I say my hard drive is flailing I mean that the fan cooling my laptop starts running full blast. I believe it is my hard drive only because I see the hard drive at 100% when I have my task manager running.
I only have an SSD (256 Gigabytes).