I respectfully disagree. Paging file hits and file fragmentation will be a huge performance drain on a hard drive running less than 20% available space. I would bet that drive is massively fragmented and the page file is probably fragmented as well making the situation even worse. A 2.8GHz p4 with almost 2GB of ram should be fine for day to day basic tasks.
My professional opinion with the situation as described, larger hard drive is going to be the biggest difference here.
Grab another drive and mount it as a secondary drive, copy at least 6-8 gigs of stuff to new drive and get something that can defrag page files like Smartdefrag2
This machine is a poor candidate for windows7, the increased overhead of 7 will result in less than pleasing performance, not to mention the install is much larger than XP.
The simple fact that you don’t realize this makes me wonder if you seriously want to post in this type of thread without a little more study in the trade.
Please realize you are giving advice based on flawed comprehension of computers and windows operating systems, to people who may take your advice and apply it to one of the most expensive things they own.
I have missed a boat or two in this type of thread over the years, but just like medical advice threads, bad info can make someones life very messy.
Problem with drive as they fill is fragmentation, not raw storage space.
When every log file, temp file, etc is having to hunt for an open space among the thousands of scraps of sectors out there among hundreds of thousands of files adding up to 900+GB files start getting fragmented REAL BAD. Then you apply a windows update and a couple key system files get a little larger and end up being fragmented, now every time windows goes after that file it takes a couple thousands of a second longer to load them. When hundreds of windows system files have that happen over time on a nearly full drive you end up with a very laggy machine.
Nonsense. This is just scaremongering. I have a couple of old XP machines that have had every single part changed at various times. MB, processor, hard drives. Sometimes Windows will require re-activation, which just (at worst) involves phoning up MS and telling them your MB broke and you had to change it (or whatever). Takes about two minutes.
