There is a fast and easy way to stop disk thrashing.  Here's what I do:

First, kill all the programs you can after a clean reboot, meaning specifically all 
the crap in the task bar.  Then go to control panel/ system/ advanced/performance 
and turn off your virtual memory.  Reboot.

1.  Delete any old crap on your drive you can get rid of.  In the run box type %temp% 
whichwill bring you to your temp directory.  Delete everything there.  This will 
fix a lot of other problems too.
  
2.  From mycomputer select the disk drive, right click and go to properties.  Turn 
indexing off here.  Also turn off compression if you can.  Disks are cheap.  When 
you hit apply it will set atributes for all you files.  Go have a cup of coffee.

3.  Now defragment your drive even if windows does not recommend it.

4.  Go back to the virtual memory control (above) and set your virtual memory to 
a value consistant with your work habits and needs.  In systems running XP with 2 
GB of memory you probably can leave it off, worst case is 2X your memory size.

Good rule of thumb - the more microsoft stuff you use the more virtually memory you 
will need and the worse the performance will be.  I'm currently fixing my wifes machine, 
80 GB HD, 512 MB of ram.  With no virtual memory I'm running 5 applications without 
any problem and my disk has spun down.  It was so loud you couldn't watch TV!

To really understand this and many other problems on your computer, get a book on 
Fedora, download it, and install it on some older hardware.  Then you'll realize 
how bad windows is as an operating system.  Linux just smokes it, plain and simple 
and its free.  My windows machine is a 3 GHZ 2 GB box that does pretty well.  My 
linux machine is my old 1.2 GHz with 512 MB.  I do everything on the 1.2 GHz box 
becuase its so much faster, never hangs, never crashes, and more applications, and 
its all free.
/Len Umina

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