Hello, my hard drive(IDE 160gig) recently decided to die, so i had to buy a new one(SATA 250gig) i had to do a clean install of windows and all the drivers and such, and its running alot "slower" than it used to on the old hard drive. Like: the cursor lags sometimes, application's take alot longer to open, windows takes and extra minute or so to start, things like that. Im running a core 2 duo e6550(2.33GHz) and 2gigs of ram, XP Home, and i know 2 gigs of ram is plenty for xp home.

tyme1012, a couple of thoughts come to mind. Anytime I hear 'slow' complaints, I immediately think of too much stuff trying to run at the same time.
Software writers simply can't fathom any set of circumstances where we wouldn't want to use their treasure, so they put it in the start menu. Take a look at yours and see if you can live without anything in it (control panel).
Next thing that comes to mind is maybe you need some partitions?
Some hard drives read the entire storage area on each 'seek' operation and if yours is going thru the whole 160 each time, it'll be slow. Maybe something like a partition of 50 would serve? Anything you can do to read a smaller area can't hurt.
HTH.
Ed in Texas.

this is a brand spanking new windows install, so the only things running are Microsoft items, im sure there no spy ware or any of that, and when i did install windows i didn't partition my drive, i never really thought it was important, is it?

ive also noticed that when i just browse the web and have music running in the background, my CPU usage almost shoots all the way up, this is strange seeing in running a core 2 duo and only running two applications.

the only thing i could think of is if my processor is "under"clocked. but i don't know how to check that kind of stuff.

"this is a brand spanking new windows install, so the only things running are Microsoft items"."ive also noticed that when i just browse the web and have music running in the background, my CPU usage almost shoots all the way up".
Does this mean you online without having installed an antivirus & firewall yet.
2nd thing that comes to mind, did you install the motherboard drivers?

larry

You should have partitioned the HDD. 50GB for the OS would be plenty, then split up the rest...one partition for programs & another for storage. And just so you know, a 250GB HDD is actually only about 232GB.

http://partition.radified.com/

Once you got XP installed, you should have installed all the necessary drivers, starting with the motherboard chipset, then move on to video, sound, network, etc. After that, you should have gone online & downloaded the Windows Updates & fixes. Then install an anti-v & firewall.

There are dozen of XP performance tweaks that can be done too:

http://datacreek.net/webgear/system...

http://www.tweakxp.com/performance_...