Folders take a long time to open

I recently inherited an HP laptop from my daughter (HP w/AMD 3400 Athlon 64 / 512MB / Windows XP Professional). My primary interest for it's use is for my digital photography.

When I first got it from her it would take a LOOoooooooong time to open the folders that held my digital files whether they were on the C drive or the external hard drive. Most folders contained 100 or less jpegs of about 3mb to 4mb each. It would sometimes take well over a minute to open them and the same time to do anything within the folders as well. And the icons would go through all kinds of resizing it was just a real PITA to do anything in a folder.

I ended up doing a complete re-install around the beginning of October and everything was normal... until yesterday and the folder antics returned again.

I am no longer storing any large folders on the C drive and have been keeping them all on an external hard drive. I did download three folders onto the C drive yesterday, but then transferred them to the external hard drive, but the issues have continued.

I have a desktop AMD 2500+ (Windows Home / 1GB RAM) that never gives me issues like this and normally use it for downloading my digital photo files.

Just wondering if anyone has any insight as to what could be causing these issues with my laptop? Sorry for the long intro. TIA.

Regards,
Jeff

 

Thanks Steve. I changed it as you suggested. We'll see how it works out.

Regards,
Jeff