latly my xp has been sloooooooow on my raid aray i using 2 80 maxtors 7200rpm ata133 not exactly a slow drive so why in the past couple of days has it got so slow i have a 1.1 athlon and 386meg of ram pc 133 and a geeforce its a sriped set not mirrored i also have a ge force four ti 4200 and 2 cd roms now i think this may be putting a bit of strain on my 300w power suply any hints

Slow performance isn't necessarily becuase of a power issue. The first thing I'd try is getting the latest drivers for the RAID subsystem. If it's an onboard array then try the manufacture of the motherboard. If it's a card, then go the site of the card maker. Next, make sure that XP is up to date. I know that there WAS a glitch with XP and RAID, but I can't remember if it's for SCSI or IDE, I seem to remember it being for SCSI RAID, but it never hurts to be sure. Barring that, just do the normal things to improve slow performance, run a defrag, a chkdsk. Delete temp files, double check swap file size. Check running processes and that kind of thing. I'd be willing to bet it's not specifically a RAID array problem.

If it is boot up speed you are talking about, there is a tool from Microsoft called Bootvis, that looks at what your pc does when it loads, then partially defrags your hard disks so the files it needs to load at startup are physically next to each other on the disk. It reduced my bootup time by 20 seconds last time I ran it (I am a fellow raid 0 guy). You may need to clean out your prefetch cache as well. One other thing to check is to do some intensive HD activity with the case off, and make sure the drive(s) are not making a clunking sound (especially with raid 0) - this means your hd is on its way out. Apart from that, I have found that storing large files on my desktop and in my profile can really slow things down (Windows must try to prefetch them or something). I have created a folder on my c drive to store downloads now rather than my desktop. I doubt it would be a PS thing, but if you do the math, you may be getting a bit too close to the 300W mark (and the 300W will probably be an optimistic 300W if it is a cheap PS) good luck

it was a problem with a windos update microsoft posted a link and i had to install a pach thaks for the imput tho