Hi,
I have been experiencing the same problem for many months now. After further research I found (based on the web site links included below) that essential windows has downgraded the transfer speeds from my IDE drive. Thus any disk activity, including memory paging etc, created a situation where my machine became very slow when loading programs or file (ie disk activity) or doing a lot of processing (ie. paging to disk).
please check these sites out -
http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm
http://users.bigpond.net.au/ni...tserviceduck/udma_fix/