It sounds like you have a hard drive controller that Windows has no drivers for. These days, it's usually a SATA controller, but it might also be a RAID setup or an obscure product. You will need the...

Sounds like your friend formatted in FAT16, an old filesystem that was phased out after Windows 95, or his PC might not support large hard drives (which can be fixed with a BIOS option, update, or a...

Heavens, this looks terribly confusing!

You installed the drive as a slave and it showed up correctly in the BIOS. Now, did you partition and format the drive? Or did you use some program that was...

It just sounds like you haven't correctly installed the drives. Put the hard drive on the primary IDE channel (the first connector on the motherboard - usually labelled IDE0 or IDE1). Ensure it is...

So where exactly are you seeing this slowdown? When does it occur?

As you would expect, but what about all the other programs fighting for system memory? 256Mb is bearable on a Windows XP system, but there is still a fair amount of swapping. You will notice a fair...

What do you mean by slowing down exactly? Is your computer "thrashing" the hard drive more often than usual? If an operating system runs low on available system RAM, it is forced to swap out to...