I defrag my drive fairly often... probably once every 3-4 days, but thanks for the input.

fair enough, but it still is a rubbish drive (no offence intended), that'll be holding your whole system back a lot to be honest

Well... true. I did get a lot more performance when I bought my new hard drive (Seagate Barracuda 200GB 7200RPM), but that still shouldn't have contributed to the problem at hand.

Not to mention that this thread is over 6 months old now...

Thanks, Getting it back to DMA mode fixed this problem. This was fixed by removing the device driver, and rebooting.

Check out "http://www.onthegosoft.com/dma_setting_nt.htm" and "http://ww.blackmaxpc.com/Guides/Enable_DMS.htm"