File transferring much slower in XP than Win 98?

Is it just me, or is file transferring (ie: copying, zipping etc) a LOT slower in XP than Win 98? This is true even though my XP machine is significantly faster than the old Win 98 one. I'm using Windows Explorer.

In the past this didn't bother me too much, but right now I'm trying to zip up a series of files in XP directly from the HD to a Zip drive, and it literally stalls with WinZip. The only solution seems to first zip it to the harddrive, then transfer the file to Zip Drive.

Thanks for any insight.

 

What hardware are you running (and how much memory)?

XP can slow down with some configurations that ran 98 nicely.

Can't speak to the zip drive part since I haven't used one of those for several years now. CD-burners these days.

 

Hi Newt:
It's a Dell P4 with 256 megs of RAM. Really quite strange, since everything runs very fast except when manipulating files. Even copying files between directories creates a noticable delay. Perhaps it's the hard drive config.