Hello STW PC boffins. I've got a couple of questions that I hope you can clear up for me.

Firstly I have a laptop which is dual boot – xp home for general and internet stuff, xp pro for audio production. On both boots things run incredibly slowly. This particularly obvious when switching between open programs (that never used to be the case with same programs) and when copying files from one folder to another (any type of data). Is this my hard drive failing? It's a four year old Acer laptop that was crashing a lot a while ago and each time would perform disk check on reboot – I believe this puts strain on the disk and reduces the lifespan.

I've recently had an external disk which I formatted with Paragon Hard Disk Manager after the Windows tool couldn't do so. I then had similar problems of hanging going into folders and not being able to copy so I presumed that disk is trashed.

Last question.
My desktop PC is also dual boot (same set up as laptop – xp home/xp pro) and I'd like to try Windows 7 (64 bit). Is there any issues just adding windows 7 and having a triple boot? The XPs are on a partitioned drive and Windows 7 would go on a separate drive.

Is everybody in a meeting?

I would say, as an IT numpty, that you are asking too much by having it a dual boot in the first place hence the slow running so to make it tri-boot will only make things worse.

Is there that much difference between Home & Pro that warrants dual booting it?

Wot uplink sez. Can't think why you'd want to dual boot XP/XP Pro?

Weird, who told you that a dual boot XP system was the way to go ?

XP Home is XP Pro without domain support, user management and a few other security\admin bits.

The set up is that the xp home boot is for general computing – internet, video and image editing and has a lot of stuff running on it. The xp pro boot is purely for audio production. It is set up to make best use of the PC's resources so no internet/antivirus/unnecessary processes hogging the system. Frequently I am running 30 – 40 tracks of audio, and maybe 10 – 20 plugins so I do max out the system. This boot is pretty clean and mostly runs like a dream.

Another benefit of the dual boot is that there is no internet distraction when I am 'working'.

I want to keep this system as it is and just add Windows 7 to try and see if I want to make the jump permanently to make use of 64 bit.

So it isn't dual boot for the different versions of xp – but for different uses.

only dual boot that would be worthwhile is Windows / Ubuntu.

However, if it used to run fine when it was originally dual boot it's probably the system getting clogged up over the years. Installing / re-installing apps and various auto updates to XP and the apps will all eventually clog up the system.

How much spare space do you have on the hard driver?
Have you defragged the hard drive recently?
When you bring up Task Manager <CTL-ALT-DEL) on the performance tab how much Physical memory is free?
= anything less than 1/2 Meg or 500K with modern systems is going to creak.

I might not be hard drive but system related.

Oh yeah what anti-viral software and music management software do you use?

You might be better looking at something like VM Ware and use virtual machines instead of messing about with dual booting things and partitioning disks etc.

Buy a new machine for work, keep the old one for surfing (after backing up your files)?

Don't listen to them, dual/triple boot makes perfect sense in that scenario.

Not sure you can have windows 7 dual booting with xp though.

Edit-quick google reveals yes you can do that.
Sounds like you ought to be running a decent quality disk tho.

The laptop – with the suspected dodgy drive had clean re-installs on both boots in the last six months. Plenty of space (15 Gb) on both partitions.

Task manager says for physical memory: Total 1046572, Available 159032, System Cache 322180.

I just cut and pasted some files and watched the CPU go from 1% to 59% – only seems to affecting the first core though.

Google 'xp check for pio mode'.

Iirc 6 dma failures locks the drive in polled io mode, causing high cpu load during io (as the os has to continually poll the disk rather than recieving a notifiction when the transfer is done)

23 minutes to move 3Gb. 😕

Moving it to an external USB 2 drive? That sounds about right, and would also explain high CPU, USB is a cycle hog.

VMWare would not be a good choice for production, but you could run Workstation and have your surfing/mail instance of XP as a vm. VNWare server is free but you'd need to disable service all the time to free up resources for the sound production – this should run native.

Spot on retro83. Transfer only in PIO mode and I had to uninstall Primary IDE channel. Now in Ultra DMA5 and running nice and smoothly. Of course I had to do this on both boots – and until I had finished everything took an age to open.

I had to do this once before – many years ago and had since forgotten about it.
I'm wondering if that old drive that failed was causing transfer errors. I had it in an external caddy to transfer between laptop and desktop. I also tried to read a DVD that was giving CRC errors.

Thanks again retro83.