In spite of all the things that point to your hard drive, before you get all involved with testing it, take a minute to check something simple. I ran into this trouble with a customer of mine. His computer was only 2 years old. He never had a problem with it being slow. Then, within a few days, the thing was crawling. Fez posted about the speed of the hard drive being slowed to PI0, due to errors. Very TRUE, BUT, what if the computer was built WRONG to begin with. It was built with a CD burner attached to the second connector on the PRI IDE controller. The problem would never show up UNTIL the owner experienced FAILURES trying to burn a CD. WIN XP looks at errors on the PRI IDE controller as coming from the Hard drive, therefore, it slowed down the hard drive to PI0, even though all the errors came from the CD burner. All CD-Roms or other ATAPI units should always be installed on the Sec IDE controller. Just a simple thing to check, BEFORE getting real complicated.