excess harddrive access when idle

[airplays]

I've been noticing that often my computer harddrive is constantly being accessed when I've been away from the computer awhile (screensaver is active).

Upon checking the task manager I see that within the top line, ("system idle process"), for every second that passes, the CPU time is incremented by 1 second, which is the same instant that I hear the harddrive being written to.
(its a laptop so the harddrive accesses are clearly audible, and its running windows 2000).

Isn't there a way to get that process to write to RAM so that when I am away from my computer for hours, the harddrive won't be constantly accessed, thereby wearing it out faster? I'd like to leave my APM set so that the harddrive will stay on, just not moving & writing...

[Disk_Contented]

The system uses idle time to perform general housekeeping tasks. Such as the tasks found in the scheduled tasks list. It would not be possible to assign these to ram.