20+ hour WinXP home install..painfully slow what gives?

[obituary]

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hello guys (& gals)
got a weird one here...a friend wanted me to check out his GF's PC said it was slow (hehehe no joke)
well i check it out and its a HP Pavilion xt938
(60GB udma/100 128MB PC133b Athlon 1.3GHz)

well ok it was loaded with a gazillion "messenger services" windows and was painfully slow to work with...first thought is 128MB is a little skimpy to be running WinXP and we were already going to get her some more ram.

so we upgrade her to 256MB of PC133 and it dont really help so i bring it home with me so i can re-install the OS and hopefully that would clear out the junk programs and such and get it back to still a bit slugish but usable state.

i take out the HDD and install in in my machine to make back ups and reformat.
everything went fine but i noticed its a slower 5400rpm drive (maxtor)

then the install of XP after putting the HDD back in her machine took like 30 minutes to drop from the estimated "39 minutes remaining" to install XP to 37 minutes!!

i just went and chilled and let it run...now it may have sat waiting for me to input some info. for an hour or so but 20+ hours to install XP is just unbelievable!

i mean its not a 386 SX/16 here were talking about!
so any idea what would make a machine perform so slowly.
and i know the drive is a lil' slower 5400 rpm but it transfered data at a normal rate when i had it in my PC to make back-ups..so i dont think its the drive.

the addition of 128MB of ram seemed to have no affect either...and the drive was freshly formated (fat32) and thus shouldnt have had any fragmentation slowing it down.
i havent givin the PC a good lookking over or tried putting in a new IDE cable yet
to see if that fixes the problem ..worth a try but i just doubt thats it.

any suggestions would be great.
thanx and latta

[eboyjones]

CD-Rom on it's last legs maybe? Scratched up installation disc?

Try coping a cd to a folder on the hard drive and see how long it takes.

[freddy]

somebody been in the bios and turned cashe off???











freddy

[obituary]

Sorry i havent responded in soooo long..no the CD is fine it ran that slow after the XP install and as far as the BIOS and someone changing a cache setting..well there isnt one. At least not one visible to the user..im sure HP hid this setting so no one can mess it up.
Nevertheless i reset the bios to default and it fixed the problem. I have seen similar things happen on a friends machine (a Dell) that stopped recognizing the HDD worked ok after i got on the phone for him and talked to Dell which had me reset to default. (although there was noting visible to reset to default, it had to be done with a combination of keys)
so i guess this machine, like his, somehow had a corruption of the BIOS or a program that altered the setings.

Thanks for the suggestions Guys.