Old and New
Until this afternoon, the drive my OS was on was an old (Feb 1999) 10 GB IBM drive. I had less than 1 GB free and was in dire need of a new drive. I had 4 drives in the case, and the contents of one was recently moved to an external USB drive, so, I finally got around to ghosting it and removing the old 10 GB drive.
What a difference in speed that makes. It's been night and day.
For a long time, it took my computer a really really long time to fully boot. On the order of 5 minutes including everything it had to do after login. Because my computer is on 24/7 I didn't really worry about it. But applications were slow to load and slow to run. I figured it was mostly due to the fact that I'm running a P-III, 700MHz /slccket/ in an ABit motherboard at least 6 years old. And while the machine is still being very limited by this setup, it sure boots and runs a lot better with a newer HD 