Hi, I recently put in a new hard drive, 80g hitachi, with XP pro. Thing is, my programs seem to load up pretty slow, slower than normal anyways. They're fine once they're loaded. Just kind of annoying. I've run complete checks on all processes running nothing unusual, and ad-wared, spybot, swat-it, Norton anti-virus checked my whole system from safe mode. They showed clean. Any ideas? Thanks

Have you defragged the drive?

No, but I've only had the new hard drive less about a month, is it necessary thats the problem so soon? I'll try and post back.

Depending on how often or how much you use the machine you should defrag at least once a week.

Defragging your HDD is always a good option, however, I bought a Hitachi 80HDD, and ran into the same probs, it was to replace my Maxtor 80HDD (thought it was dead), now I use the Hitachi as SL and the Maxtor as MS. Interesting to see if any other forum users have come accross this problem. Hope this helps The world is full of willing people, some are willing to work, others are willing to let them; just a thought!

I use Western Digital drives for speed, not Maxtor, Seagate, or Hitachi, although Maxtor now has been using the same 8 Meg cache that WD has been using for some time. The Hitachi drive may be a slower drive, or have less cache, then the older drive you were using. It is important to know the spindle speed of the drive (most nowadays are 7200 RPM), the cache (8 Meg is becoming standard) and the access time of the drive. The faster the access time, the quicker your drive will perform. One more possibility is that you actually have a poor Windows installation, or a driver causing a problem. Unfortunately, the only way to tell is to reload Windows onto another drive and compare the speeds. I hope I have been informative.

Thanks for the replies. The defrag didn't seem to make much of a difference. It's probably slower access than my last one...not sure though.