Partioning an active drive or not??

[jaga]

I am confused about whether my problem is partitioning or memory. Here goes I am downloading a lot of music and currently have 15 gig out of a 60 gig hard drive filled with my programs as well as new music.I notice that boot up my computer after just power it up and logging in under my user account in Xp is slower than it used to be.I have 4 128Rambus chips installed on a Asus P4t motherboard.I installed a full version of ME when I built my computer and then put a XP Home edition upgrade on top of that.After reading about partioning and boot partitions I am still a little scepticale of running Partition Magic 8 program without knowing if my problem is memory related or not.I have currently C:which is my hard disk D:is myDVD rom and E:which is my CDRW.I would like to have a boot partition just for booting up and running OS and a couple more partitions for music,pictures Etc.. but I don't uderstand how it is best to set up partitions.Thanks in advanced for any feedback. I created a restore point and ran a defrag which was reccomended by Partition Magic. :(

[Force Flow]

First, try clearing your temp folder and temporary internet folder. Uninstall progs that you don't need anymore. Disable progs that load at startup that you don't need. These progs run constantly in the background.

Check this out too: http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,109696,00.asp

[jaga]

Thanks for the info I cleared internet files,cookies etc. but I am not gaining any speed while loggin on.Should I try partitioning or more memory??

[Force Flow]

Did you run "msconfig" to get rid of progs that load at startup?

Partitioning like what you said won't hurt anything. When you partition with partitionmagic, it takes your free space from C and allows a D partition.

The partiton arrangement is similar to what I have now. I suppose there is a slight speed increase, but I don't know if it's really significant.

I'm guessing that your system is just bogged down with glitches and apps. Try downloading Ad-Aware and scan your computer.

[kissfan]

As well as the above, something that you might like to consider, and I know you'll not like this, but the Hard Drive could be going south.

I dealt with this very issue under XP for a customer a while back.
Even with SMART enabled it did not report his failing HDD.

A clean install of XP did not cure the problem, disk tools from the maker of the disk did not report anything untoward (if I remember right it was a seagate drive).

However installing a test HDD revealed that all was OK with the rest of the hardware, and when we loaded up all his usual apps there was very little decrease in boot time.

Not saying that this is the problem, and you should run through all the other suggestions given, but keep this in the back of your mind.

[mike breck]

A clean install of XP is always better than an upgrade.

Also what anti-virus software do you have? Is it set to scan on startup?

Are you networking PCs?

You might like to download Bootvis and see if a particular application or service is causing the slow bootup:

http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platform/performance/fastboot/BootVis.asp

HTH

[jaga]

Guys I just wanted to thank you for the info I really appreciate it I have not found the time to try anything out yet,but I think the problems are probably related to the XP upgrade instead of a full install.Like I had said before I have been too busy to try anything you guys had last suggested.Thank you for finding the time for your feedback I will update you to the results when I find them.