2 Questions about Vista Indexing

a few months ago i bought a computer for Vista, to
start learning the Voice Recognition capabilities of
the OS.

this is the hardware -
CPU - Intel E6850
M'Board - Intel 975XBX2
RAM - Mushkin Micron D9 DDR2, 2 x 1 GB
Video - eVGA 8600GT
HD - Seagate 320 GB
Power Supply - Antec Phantom 350 watt

the power supply is kind of a temporary measure.
i had it laying around and was getting sticker
shock from the project.

so far, all that's installed is Vista 32-bit Ultimate.

and, graphics card drivers.

Question #1 - the hard drive is exercising away.
for the last 20 years, this kind of hard drive activity
was a symptom of inadequate RAM, or some
bodacious computer activity.

There are no aps. on the machine, except for
all of what comes with Vista.

==> Is the OS indexing itself, sort of like Yahoo Desktop
Search indexing, except, with no aps. and no ap. files
on the machine ?

it doesn't really matter. there's other posts how
to turn it off if i want.

Question #2 - Is it possible to use the indexing
capabilities of Vista to index a subset of the
Internet ?

one way to do this is to use HT Track, and download
websites onto the computer, and let Vista index them.

But ... i would prefer to use Vista to index the
websites without downloading them. just let it
go out and roam the internet, so that, when i use
Vista Search, it returns a combination of local and
network locations, in the circumstance where ap.
files have been migrated to the new machine.