[Billy_bob_bob]

You are entirely correct. I wasn't clear enough in my reply, the physical hard drive is fine, it should work for years if it is a decent brand. The problem has to do with the way the OS deals with managing data on the drive. For some reason it tends to start "gumming up", I can't get more technical that that, it just gets slower and slower, the disk grinds and grinds away on jobs that used to take a minute and now take ten. And, from what I can tell, it IS unique to the Windows world.

[ECM]

I remember the days when my computer would boot up in two shakes of a lamb's tail...

Now it resembles bloated pig wallowing to the trough...

Ah, Microsoft...

[js1138]

I wasn't clear enough in my reply, the physical hard drive is fine, it should work for years if it is a decent brand. The problem has to do with the way the OS deals with managing data on the drive. For some reason it tends to start "gumming up"...

I can assure it is not the OS doing that. I have supported dozens of win2000 and XP machines running Autocad, Photoshop and SQL Server. They do not slow down or gum up. In fact they run pretty well without defragmenting the drive. One thing to think about is whether the "go back" function is active. This could be eating resourses and shouldn't be necessary on a machine that is backed up regularly. Are the drives or folders compressed? What about indexing? Are there any unnecessary services running?

As I said, I have seen a machine do this and have seen it fixed by reformatting and reinstalling. I wish I knew the cause, but I do know it isn't necessary or typical.