[ale] Identify process hammering disk

[James Taylor]

I just installed SUSE10.1 RC1 on my notebook.
Very nice install by the way.  Everything worked flawlessly. (Sony Vaio VGN-A290)
However, I have two issues, one of which I remember having before and stumbling across an answer which I can no longer recall.

The first is, every so often I get message blocks on my screen that say Brightness and show a percentage and a bar type indicator.  Or I will get the same kind of box that says LCD off.

I think it may have had something to do with powersave, but I'm not sure.


The other thing is that my drive light is staying active.  In the past it has usuallybeen find or man page index that causes this, but it stops after a while.
It is neither of these, and the light is on continuously when the computer is on.
At first I thought it might be beagle, but it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything most of the time.

Nothing is showing much activity in Performance Monitor. 

While investigating this I started looking for a tool to monitor disk activity and relate it to a process,  but nothing stands out.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

-jt