Don’t ever let someone tell you that all hard drives are the same because they’re full of shit. Some drives are sub-par, such as Maxtor, which I now officially hate (and understand why they are so much cheaper than the other brands). I will never ever ever buy another one. First I had one that was less than a year old suddenly die on me. The data on it was unrecoverable. And now my current one is dragging ass.
Of course, there’s no doubt that Windows has a play in that. A wise friend once said you should reinstall your operating system every six months to keep everything operating at top performance. Joe installed 512 mb of DDR RAM in my machine today, yet my computer was still puttering along. After fighting with Win XP to get the drive back into DMA mode (for whatever reason it reverted to PIO mode), it’s a bit faster, but still not good enough. When my home machine is slower than my work one, we have a problem. So please excuse me while I shop online for a new hard drive and processor…