Hard Drive activity light constantly blinking - new WIN7 Ultimate Dell PC

I've been troubleshooting this problem off and on for weeks on my brand new WIN-7 64 Ultimate Dell XPS 8000 (I7-860 1TB HD 8GB Ram).    Searching around has found many recommendations and a couple of resolved issues, (more non-resolved), but none of the recommendations has helped me.  

I got a feeling that this may be a Dell-specific issue, but I got no response in the Dell forums.   I'm sure if I call Dell support, all I will get is recommendation to put it back to factory default.  no thanks! 

I have disabled all the suspects, at least temporarily to see if it has an affect:

Windows Indexing & Search

Windows Firewall

Windows Defender

System Restore

Remote Differential Compression

Windows Fax & Scan

Superfetch

Seaport

With all these off, the blinking was clearly less busy, but there was still a steady heartbeat type of blink.   I since re-enabled Defender and System Restore.    (Even if they were to blame, that is hardly an acceptable solution/workaround!!!)

I've studied disk activity in PERFMON and there is some occasional kernel activity and event logging.  I took a couple of window snapshots I can post (if I can figure how).   I also created HijackThis log.  

Sometimes the disk activity PERFMON window is blank but yet the light continues to blink!!!  huh???

I have not disabled hibernate (there was a suggestion somewhere it could be involved).  I use it regularly.   But I can try that too you think it might help.

I am at my wits end and a little overwhelmed at all the data to study and search for.  I hate diddling with services and the registry, fearful of getting in over my head and creating a mess I can't get out of.  

Also, there is no additional security software and I did not install any preinstalled trial crapola.

Help!!!!!!!!

I will post the hijack this log in the next post

  Update to clarify:  What I reported above is basically about out-of-the-box behavior... not application or CPU-bound related. The system was pretty clean with minimal extra software/hardware installed.