[Washi]

Might be the 'crapware' mentioned by a previous poster. Did I miss what operating system you are using?

I would look at the device manager (probably from the control panel -> system -> device manager) at the specific device (external drive) and see if it says it is 'working correctly.'

See if there is an updated driver available from the manufacturer.

[A CA Guy]

I would look at the processes running and look and see if the CPU is constantly running near 100%.

If there is suck a process doing that, write the name down and see if it is a process associated with some new or uneeded program or virus.

Also, the drive will slow down if it is not a USB2 port.

[JavaTheHutt]

I have an Western Digital external hard drive that hooks up through USB 2.0 connection, and it slows down my computer also. I don't keep it hooked up constantly, just when I need to use it. I have a pentium 4 2.66GHz with a gig of RAM running XP Media Center edition.

My advice is to just disconnect it when you aren't using it, and be prepared for a slow down when you are using it.

[Senator Bedfellow]

I know that this drive was responsible.

Easy way to test that - hook it up to your wife's laptop and see if she has the same problem.

[dinasour]

Go to the manufacturer's web site and try to get the latest drivers and software.

Uninstall everything you can find that you may have loaded with the drive. Some versions of Roxio cd writer are known to have conflicts and some "junk" drives will install spyware on your system.

Temporarily turn off your antivirus, especially if it is Norton. In fact if it is Norton, get rid of it and install AVG, anyway.

Run a full spyware scan with Spybot Search and Destroy and Lavasoft Ad-ware. 

Right click on "My Computer", go to "Services" and stop the Indexing Service.

You may have activated some crapware copy protection scheme:

Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, then select taskmanager from the dialog. You can use this to see if a particular program is using too much CPU time. This may give you some direction as to the source of the problem.

System Internals as a nice freeware program called autoruns which will help you temporarily turn off any programs that load at startup.

 Ain't computers grand.

 

 

 

 

[dinasour]

Go to the manufacturer's web site and try to get the latest drivers and software.

Uninstall everything you can find that you may have loaded with the drive. Some versions of Roxio cd writer are known to have conflicts and some "junk" drives will install spyware on your system.

Temporarily turn off your antivirus, especially if it is Norton. In fact if it is Norton, get rid of it and install AVG, anyway.

Run a full spyware scan with Spybot Search and Destroy and Lavasoft Ad-ware. 

Right click on "My Computer", go to "Services" and stop the Indexing Service.

You may have activated some crapware copy protection scheme:

Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, then select taskmanager from the dialog. You can use this to see if a particular program is using too much CPU time. This may give you some direction as to the source of the problem.

System Internals as a nice freeware program called autoruns which will help you temporarily turn off any programs that load at startup.

 Ain't computers grand.

 

 

 

 

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Plug the thing in to USB only when you need to burn a DVD. Otherwise, turn it off and leave it unplugged.

I have external USB 2.0 storage and only turn it on and plug it in when I need to do backups.