Hard drive constantly spinnig up/down
 

When I am on my laptop, my hard drive is constantly slowing down and speeding up. Even when I'm doing stuff like updatedb it slows down and the program has to wait for it to speed up, and when it's just sitting there it starts going up and douwn out of nowhere. How can I make it go down after a specific time and not before?

it *might* be your bios setting the power management to max, which tries to save your power on the battery? (see if there is any difference when you have power plugged in) and definitely check the manual of your notebook, it should say soemthing about it.

there is a chance about the battery module (battery.o) in your kernel that pushes things here and there, but i doubt it :)

There's a lot of things going on "in the background" that use the disk, some of this activity is unavoidable, however, I use hdparm for that kind of thing, I would think you've got an rpm for that in your distribution, if not google it, definitely read the man page carefully :)