Would dead PS2 ports on a P4 (i810 chipset) board make it run as slow, or slower then a P2, because that is what is happening with this HP Pavilion 7960 recently... The only other thing I can think of would be the old hard drive...

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P4 1.3 ghz
2 - 64MB PC 800 RDRAM
8GB Maxtor UDMA2 hard drive
Geforce 4 440MX 64MB DDR
Windows XP Pro
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its a good sign the boards on its way out, and a udma2 hard drive will be slow compared to a new drive

I always believed the biggest reason for HD crashes was heavy disk usage thru swapping. That probably is the reason why disk crashes were far more frequent in the past with typical RAM configs of 128 megs or less.
Your disk might have developed bad sectors ... that seems to be the most relevant reason. Do a full disk scan and give us a follow-up. The UDMA2 bit has no relevance with your problem.

Well, it seems that NDD has a problem with my hard drive. It says that it is in use by the OS or another program... When I turned the "fix errors" off, it scanned the disk and found no errors.

But I wonder if I have contracted some little virus or something that has not been detected by NAV and is tying up the hard drive...

Or maybe the 4 year old HDD is finally out of gas...

thats very much possible especially with norton's optimistic scan approach. Run msconfig and check for any suspicious entries in your startup ...or maybe its just this big program that you've installed recently that loads at startup and has totally escaped ur notice

also try defragmentation, maybe ur HD's fragmented a bit too much

ensure that you have 200 MB or more of free hard disk space, remember 64 mb is not quite enough for running today's apps and your OS needs sufficient hard disk space to make up for the same. The lack of it will result in heavy disk activity as the OS tries to manage too much in too little space

To clarify:

There are 2 64MB chips = total 128 ram

4 GB free space on the hard drive

Programs that load with windows are

Norton Personal Firewall 2002
Norton AntiVirus 2002

Better than before since I ran PowerPro Tweaks... But still awfully slow..

BTW even in safe mode, NDD thinks the disk is being used by another prog or the OS...

[quote="ruutu37"]Would dead PS2 ports on a P4 (i810 chipset) board make it run as slowquote]

The i810 chipset doesn't support a 1.3GHz P4 so you must have something else (i840 or something that supports RDRAM?).

I assume that you are using an USB keyboard and an USB mouse with that system is the PS/2 ports are dead. The loss of the ports themselves shouldn't affect your system speed.

Your 8GB UDMA2 hard drive will be limiting performance somewhat as will the 128MB RAM but the system be that bad. The 1.3GHz P4 is less efficient than a 1.3GHz P3 but it should whip a Pentium II system.

I'm not a huge fan of Norton products since they take gobs of resources so try and kill off some of your tasks to see what happens when your memory is freed up a bit.