XP Pro .......S...L...O...W...!

[AmiGR]

Short of this, it's a reinstall.

Actually, add 7) Use registry cleaning utilities and generally familiarise yourself with the registry. My sister had a Win 2k system running pretty well for 4 years before switching to XP and it was loaded with apps to hell and back.

[AmiGR]

Agreed. I was having performance problems with my laptop until I removed McAfee Security Suite and replaced it with the free Virus Checker "AVG". The speed increase was amazing. I don't know what McAfee was doing in the background, but it was cripling my machine.

And BitDefender is even faster, it's the fastest I've ever used.

[AmiGR]

Most stuff I've tried RUNS on it. Just very little is OPTIMIZED for it. 32-bit apps behave about the same as they do on regular 32-bit XP. The benchmarks say it's slightly slower than 32-bit XP for 32-bit apps, but, honestly, I don't think it's enough to be visible to humans. If you have the 64-bit proc, you might as well run the 64-bit OS for it.

The only problems arise when there's no x64 driver for some hardware you may have (haven't had this problem, personally, it usually arises when you use legacy hardware) and when you want to use things like Directory Opus in explorer replacement mode, it has quite a few issues, since it's 32 bit.