PC running extremely slowly

I'm running win2k Pro on a PIII, 550Mhz with 512Mb RAM. until recently, it ran fine, but somewhere in the last month or two I noticed that performance has gotten VERY slow. It now takes a long time to do even simple tasks (such as logging in, opening a new application, etc). I don't know where to begin with trying to find the problem, but here's some info:

1. I have the original hard drive (13 gig) partitioned into C: and D: - win2kPro is installed on C:, I installed all other applications on D:\apps\ (when they allowed me to choose)

2. I added a 120Gig Hard Drive for additional storage - I can't recall what the original jumper block position was, but I believe I've set them both to "Cable Select" - I think after doing this, I noticed the first (minor) slowdown in performance.

3. after that, the only things I've done were a) installed Morpheus and b) installed scanner software/drivers.

In an attempt to clean up my PC, I uninstalled all the apps and reinstalled Win2kPro over the old installation, hoping that would clear out all the previous junk, but that has not improved performance at all. But I did NOT do a reformat of my C: prior to the reinstall. Any questions, suggestions or feedback that helps me figure this out would be greatly appreciated!

 

I've read of issues with some systems using "cable select" for the drives. You might want to try setting the jumpers for master and slave.

Also if you feel up to a reconfigure of the system, you'll probably see faster performance if your OS is on a partition on the larger drive since it should be much faster than the smaller one. If you have a tool like partition magic you could easily move things around on the large drive to free space at the beginning of the drive for a new "C" partition, remove the small drive for a while, and load the OS on your new partition.

 

thanks for the input...after much headache (moved all the data to a new HD and tried to reformat it to clean it up, which after 6 hours was less than 50% complete) I think the hard drive itself was just bad so I got rid of it. oh well...win some, lose some