RJARRRPCGP

For systems getting long in the tooth, (even if just a little) I would try Debian and maybe SliTaz. Or for a 'buntu, I would try Kubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot or Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.

I would suspect the ATA cable.

It's a real bad Fdisk bug. It always worked fine with another program to partition the HDD. I noticed this problem (or similar) back in 2002 when I got a Maxtor 4D080H4 80 GB.

Intel processors, at least since Pentium 4, self-underclock if the temp is measured to be past roughly 85 C on the processor.

Looks like it's not even recognized, even when it's Windows 2000. Like it thinks the OS is way too new lol.

I gotten word that a throttling processor can cause the OS to report high CPU usage percentage. (When it self-underclocks because of reaching close to 90 C) The heatsink may not even be all the way on the chip. (more common with the darn 775 push-pin heatsinks than with a 478) Or a lot of dust.

With the Award BIOS on Dell Inspiron 530S and Dell Vostro 200, "RAID" is AHCI. The BIOS menu calls AHCI "RAID" lol.

Looks like a bad HDD. Slow booting is likely a symptom of a bad HDD.

It's not 2006, so 3.5 is almost nothing. Roughly 3.5 is likely stock with many processors now lol. It's amazing how far we are with processors now.