I agree with movida. A harddrive on any computer, once it is over half full does run noticeably slower, at least that's been my experience. I just cleared a bunch of stuff off of mine (it was a little over half full) and the entire OS and all program run faster. I've heard that spyware can slow things down dramatically. You might want to check and see if any has gotten through. Before I got XP Pro, I would to a complete reformat about once a year, just because the registry of the Win 9x boxes always got very "junky" after that long. I'm not sure that's as much of an issue with XP.