[Quilla]

Reformat the hard drive - I'm afraid I'm familiar with the process. I can easily copy critical date via the network and then reinstall OS and engineering software. But it's really a shame this operation has to be performed on such a 'young' computer. Sheesh, I hate this stuff.

Many, many thanks.

[Billy_bob_bob]

It has been my experience that when you run heavy duty software on a PC (CAD-CAM, Photoshop, etc.) you can pretty much expect to have to re-format the hard drive every six months or so. As you say, the system is "young", but the drive has many many hard miles on it and the "rot" has built up. Give it a good scrubbing with a formatting and it should be good as new.

[Capt_Hank]

Try running www.pcpitstop.com, very good at finding problems with XP and helping to repair them.

[Myrddin]

Have you defragged the hard disk? Is the swap file on a dedicated partition? Are you setting the NTFS allocation size to a value no smaller than 1024? I've made these standard practices for years on NT boxes. They run fast for years. The Diskeeper products from Executive Software are very effective.

I've retired all but one Windows 98 machine around the house. Windows 98 has a memory leak in the kernel that MS has chosen not to fix. All the machines that I use to develop software are Windows 2000. My kids run XP Home. I picked that for better compatibility with their gaming products and fewer sysadmin headaches for me.

[jimt]

Can y'all help?

We run heavy duty engineering software all the time without reformatting or other heroic measures - on NT 4.0.

If you don't need USB or InfraRed, you can get a lot better performance without all the BS.

NT 4.0 was designed to run on 486's with 16 MB of memory. On our late model equipment it rocks.