Here's another one for you pariah's of information.

Firstly...during boot-up (right after it detects the primary/secondary drives), SMART predicts a hard drive failure on my primary-slave, my Maxtor HD that I use mainly for mp3's/movies/TV shows aparently is facing an "immenant failure."

I immediately backed up all the data and....3 months later I'm still getting the same error. I can defragment the drive just fine, I created a new, small partition just as a test, McAfee tells me there's no shit flying around looking for a fan to hit.

My brother initially bought it to be the main HD on his computer, but after it crashed roughly a week or so after he got it, we got him a Western Digital and in my eternal graciousness offered to take the thing off his hands and give it a good home.

If after 3 months I'm getting the same error...should I really be concerned? It's getting irritating every time I download a new episode of scrubs or smallville to have to immediately back it up...just in case.

...

Secondly...any friendly programs out there that will allow me to right click on a fire/folder and identify all the processes that are using it so I can shut them down? Getting a little sick of having to reboot everytime I want to delete something because XP gives me that wonderful "File is in use" error even though nothing is obviously running it (for example a winamp playlist being 'in use' even though winamp isn't on). Ad-Aware and McAfee both declare me home free so....

I'm using "Process XP" atm, but I can never seem to find what I'm looking for and end up having to reboot to solve the problem (rebooting always seems to allow me to delete whatever file/folder that was giving me the problem."

www.sysinternals.com (http://www.sysinternals.com/) is your friend.

Mark Russinovich is a god among men :)

You'll be most interested in HANDLE (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/handle.shtml) which does EXACTLY what you want, showing you what files are in use by what process. You may also find Filemon (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/filemon.shtml) something useful, as it lets you watch items in realtime (I strongly suggest applying filters before watching the spam). Finally, for those who think Task Manager is too wimpy for them and Handle is too boring, go with Process Explorer (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml).

There isn't a serious self-respecting Windows-based computer guru who doesn't swear the Mark Russinovich is a god.

By the way, I keep a copy of the entire Sysinternals website on my "600 Megs of Stuff I Can't Live Without" CD. HTTrack (http://www.httrack.com/) is a great program for making mirrors.

You may mod me +1 Informative :)

Moving on to your SMART issue, first, I can't tell you much more about SMART that is detailed over at the Seagate site (http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/smart.html).

Your SMART failure notice could be as simple as the drive takes too long to spin up to speed. This could, among other things, be a factor of a bad power supply. Then again, it could be any of a hundred other things, such is SMART.

Lucky for you Maxtor makes this all pretty painless:

Go to the RMA page (https://www4.maxtor.com/en/support/service/rma/create/), download PowerMax (http://downloads.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/downloads/powermax.exe), fill everything out, and let them send you a free replacement drive.

(PowerMax just makes boot-floppies for a Maxtor licensed version of OnTrack.)

Thanks man. That's three less advil a week to say the least.