couple of questions...

1) Sometimes when I do things like play a flash game, I hear the fan on my Dell XPS 435MT get a little loud. I have uploaded a video file... you can hear it at about 8 seconds. Is this normal?

2) I'm running a WD1001FALS Western Digital 1 terabyte hard drive as my secondary hard drive... I don't know if it matters, but I have an i7 processor, 6 gb ram, and am running windows 7. Sometimes when I go to click on a file in the secondary hard drive, it takes a few seconds and you hear the hard drive start to access the file. This usually only happens when I haven't used the hard drive in a few hours. I'm assuming it goes into like a sleep mode, but wasn't sure... Any ideas on this?

Thanks.

forgot to upload file..

extra cpu load generates extra heat -> fans runs faster to cool it down.
if you want you can install coretemp to monitor your cpu temp.

you can try to change power settings to prevent power off for harddrives
try to use high performance plan or change plan settings;

both are normal (fan and hdd)

1. Flash uses an unreasonable amount of CPU.

2. The drive automatically goes to sleep when not accessed for a while.

3. Your thread title sucks.

As stated above...

1. Flash = CPU usage = heat = fans on high

2. Depending on settings, hard drives turn off when inactive. They take a couple seconds to spin back up to speed. You can disable hard drive sleep, or change the timeout.

OS/system drives generally never sleep, no matter what settings, 'cause they're always somewhat active (reading and writing).