Problem with Harddrive

[Gloryfieldzi]

well, all of a sudden, my computer became extremely slow.

I was thinking it's a hard drive problem

It now takes aprximately 7 minutes to startup computer, before taking less than 30 seconds, and now all my programs run much slower.

I checked the ram and i had 130 free megs of ram, so that's not a prob.

I have WD 120 gig 8mb cache SE hd

Windows XP Professional + XP Service Pack 1
AMD Athlon ThunderBird 1333mhz Stock speed
Samsung 256 DDR PC2100
Asus A7A266 MotherBoard
Sapphire Radeon 9500 Pro OEM
300 Watts Power Supply
SoundBlaster PCI128

 

[Gloryfieldzi]

BUMP

 

[Gloryfieldzi]

does any1 know why?

 

[HaroldW]

Have you run a complete viruscan and scanned for spyware (I use Ad-Aware)? Did you install any drivers or software just before this happened? You could also go to your hard drive manufacturers website, download their diagnostics software and run all the "non-destructive" tests. Have you used MSCONFIG to look at all the startup stuff to look for something odd and reduce the programs that startup automatically to a minimum? Are you maybe running Kazaa? If your hard drive is formatted FAT32 (not NTFS) you could create a Windows 98 boot floppy and try to access the data on the hard drive. If that works fine then something in XP is causing the problem. If you have a network card installed, look at your hub during that slow startup period. If the LED on the hub is showing a great amount of traffic, then your network card may have gone bad. Try removing the network card to see if the problem goes away.