Computer help from the gurus

[elau]

My laptop is acting very strange the last couple of days. It is a Dell Latitude CPx running NT 4.0 with 512 MB RAM.

The hard drive constantly churning and the page refresh is very slow. I have tried to play with the virtual memory to see if that makes a difference but not.

Currently, this is my settings:
Total paging file size is set at 100 MB
Boost is set in the middle
Regisry size is set at 49

Hard drive capacity is 5G, but I noticed that it diminishes very quickly. It seems like something is eating up my disk space but I don't know where to look. I can go from 975 MB to 355 MB just to open IE and look at a web page.

I have set my Internet Options as follows:
Days to keep pages history: 1
Privacy: medium

As soon as the HD stops churning, everything runs smoothly. I also notice my fan is constantly running, and the machine runs hot all the time. There is nothing abnormal that I can identify with the Task Manager.

Does that mean my HD is about to crash?
Bad memory?
Have a TSR program somewhere killing my disk space.

What can I do to fix my problem? Any help will be appreciated.