I have a somewhat strange situation. I installed WinXP Home back when it was first released (I believe 3 years ago, but is it maybe 4?- the memory's the first to go, they say :) ). I have since upgraded it with all the updates, including SP1 and now SP2, and have had both nVidia ad ATI cards installed over this time. I have installed both FS2002 and Fs9 over the life of this OS install. I also run Outlook/Excel/Word, some photo/movie editing software and various other utilities, and have Norton Internet security (virus and firewall protection).FS has been slow, so a few months ago after re-installing FS9 and seeing little increase in performance, I decided to create a second instance of WinXP on D:, using multi-boot. This is also upgraded to SP2 (went straight from a raw install to SP2). All I have installed on this instance is FS9, and since I have the NIC disabled I have yet to install a virus/firewall package (although SP2 does include a firewall).Both OS's are the same (XP to SP2) and use the identical hardware. However, it's like night and day. My original instance takes up to 4 times as long to boot up and shut down, and the performance of FS is about much better on the new instance with little or no stutters (which really bugs me about the older instance of FS).Some of this difference may be the Norton AV, but I can't believe all of it can be attributable to that. Do operating systems just "age" like this, due to maybe the collection over time of programs that get installed into it? I wonder if the progressive updates to the original XP versus the direct-to-SP2 update on the new instance may be a part of the difference? Driver versions are identical, and on the original version I have run driver uninstall apps when changing drivers and/or video cards. Thanks for any ideas, I'm just curious.Bruce.

Hi Bruce,Send me an email. I want to chat with you on Instrument [email protected]. Sieffert

You're quite correct in that Windows tends to slow down over time. This was especially true for Win98 and I'm surprised you noticed such a significant improvement by making a fresh install of WinXP. It's supposed to be much better than the older OS'es in this regard. Still the longest I ran the same WinXP install was about 1 year so I wouldn't know. 3 years is a *very* long time to run the same install. With all the constant installing and removal of programs and drivers things like the registry and system files get very messy over time.Boot time is usually the first thing that turns slow. To overcome this I run Microsoft Bootvis and RaxCo Perfect Disk regularily. These two utilities really do wonders to the boot time and makes the OS feel like it's freshly installed, if only for a week or so. Bootvis can be found for free at various sites (use Google). Perfectdisk costs money but is well worth it.Norton AV could well also be partly responsible for your slowdowns. It's notoriously bloated and resource-hungry and I read a post from someone who got much better performance after uninstalling it.

On it's way!

Thanks Jimmi. I might go get those apps you refer to, if only to keep my new OS in good shape.Bruce.

I experiencing that all the time thus I reinstall everything every 2 month or something. Have ghost so it

Also, try replacing Norton AV with eitherAVG: http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php-or-Avast: http://www.avast.com/Both are free and use less resources than NAV. If you don't notice any performance difference you can go back to NAV :)

Hi Bruce,This another indispensable tool for maintaining the registry: http://www.fixregistry.com/regheal/index.htmEasy to configure and use. Offers safe registry management.Cheers,Greg

Thanks guys, some great advice here.Bill- you have mail (sorry it took me so long to get back to you!).Thanks everyone,Bruce.

Do you have any increases in framerates?RH

Yes. I don't have any comparible numbers for you right off the bat, but frame-rates are noticeably better. Most noticeable is the lack of stutters.Bruce.