I didn't take the time to read the entire thread of what exactly is making the system slow, but here are my two cents.
My friend has a intel pentium 4 3.2ghz cpu that I believe was either socket LGA774 or 775, i forget since im not a big intel fan. ;-)
But put it this way.... It crawled like crazy, loading applications took forever, and even at times, it just froze out of nowhere. Now, my other Shuttle PC which has an older socket pentium 4 @ 2.4ghz, and that Shuttle is many times faster in 3d games, running applications, etc...
Turned out that the Motherboard is flaky..... The SATA controller is what made the entire system crawl. Even if you attempt to install a fresh copy of XP, no go.
I would have to go with getting a different board :-D
just get a cheap one from newegg.com or even ebay. Heck, I run a Biostar Socket AM2 cpu motherboard and this thing is hauling @$$. :-D
And yes, i do run Windows XP PRO. :-)
