slooooow performance

[Chris]

Something recently happened to my computer where all it
would do is reboot itself infinitely. Not even safe mode
would allow me access. System restore couldn't restore a
thing. I choose what I guess was my only option - a
repair installation. Everything went well. All my
programs and data were still intact, however, now it
takes every bit of 5 min to cold start the computer.
Once started, the programs seem to run fine - music plays
correctly, games run ok, even the DVDs play fine; but if
I transfer data between hard drives(yes I have 2
harddrives installed), the system crawls. After doing
the repair installation I did all the updates that I had
done before skipping the famous 811493. I knew something
was still wrong when while trying to download and install
SP1, things were moving at a snails pace. I've checked
system devices and I don't see any driver issues. Is
there something I missed while doing the repair
install??? Problem seems to be when it has to read or
write big files to the hard drives - either of them. Any
suggestions on how to get back the performance??? I have
a custom built 2.8P4 on an MSI mobo, 512mb ram, 2 120gb
maxtor HDD running on XP Home. Thanks for any help
offered...

 

[Chris]

Thanks for the advice, but I've already checked the task
manager. Even though copying between 2 drives slows down
the computer, my cpu cycles don't reach 100%. Instead
they vary from 50-75%. It seems like it's reading or
writing very slowly, but it wasn't like this before the
repair install.