Need to resolve three issues

[itry2hide]

I have three problems that cropped up after installing 10.6.8 -

• The hard drive is always being accesses
  
• System won't sleep automatically
  
• I lose text integrity in my menus every now and then. Restarting the finder fixes this.
  

 

I'm not sure about the hard drive issue. It takes much longer to boot, and list folder contents. I have a 13 inch macbook pro with the same setup - boots up 15-20 seconds faster. My boot drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000. It's mid level in most benchmarks I've seen at around 131 MB/s. I ran AJA system test software and got 86 MB/s write and 88 MB/s read speeds on a 512 MB file. That seems pretty slow to me. Any ideas?

 

My system only goes to sleep if I press the power cycle button on my case. My system will auto shutdown at night and auto start in the morning.

 

Every now and then I lose the font in my menus. Everything looks like little boxes. The menus come back if I quit and restart the finder.

 

My hardware specs are in my sig - I am not using a DSDT.

 

Thanks for any suggestions. The hard drive is the biggest issue.