Windows 2000 slooooow

Hi guys, new to the forum and seeking some help with Win2K problems. My system originally had a 40gig drive and all ran perfectly for a long time. Then one day I powered up, and 45 minutes later the boot finished. Clicking on any button (or hovering over a taskbar icon) would get a response maybe a minute later. Programs would open up after about 10mins. I put it down to the drive, which would never boot unless connected as slave to a 2gig drive I had. I got a 20gig drive and did a fresh install. All went well until I downloaded 50mb of updates (on top of SP4), at which point the same problem occurred. I ran System Mechanic (it took 36 hours!) but no improvement. I have since re-installed on to a 13gig HDD. This time the problem appeared after Automatic Updates downloaded Installer3.1 and BITS while I was manually checking for updates to SP4.
My PC is a Gigabyte Athlon1.3 with 256mb DDR and Gigabyte drivers for GPU, ethernet, audio etc installed. The machine was flaky for a while until I cleaned the motherboard; it now seems OK because I can boot off Win2k on the 2gig HDD (still SP1) and it will stay running for days, during which time I can access the few utilities I have dared to instal. But I need to get the OS running on the 20gig. AVG shows no virus on any of the drives when all connected. Any help greatly appreciated!!

 

Been awhile since I looked at windows 2000.

Two things I'd look at is if the memory is going bad, or if the hard drive is going bad.
A quick check on the hard drive is to run chkdsk.
Click START, then RUN, then type in: cmd (press enter).
type in
chkdsk /r c: (press enter).
yes
yes
type in exit
reboot

for the ram, try running memtest86+:

http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4226

 

I've run chkdsk over both drives and all is OK with them. They've both been formatted with no problems before fresh install of 2000.

I'll try that memtest later on. I'll boot from the little 2gigger - at least the system still runs from that. I'm not going to update that past SP1 (I'll stay offline).

 

For what it is worth after all this time (I forgot that I had posted on this forum);

I eventually fixed the problem. It was Comodo Anti-virus. I discovered this when I installed this program on an XPpro computer and it suffered the same slowdown symptoms. Deleting the CAV program files restored normal service, so I went back to the Win2K and did the same. It immediately started to run at normal speed.
Although I have had a good run with Comodo Firewall, I will avoid their anti-virus like the plague. It completely mucked up 3 seperate installations of Windows 2000.
You might wonder why I didn't notice that this program was the cause of the problem. The thing is that the troubles didn't start straight after it was installed. I didn't pick it as being the common link because I don't remember installing it on the first W2K to go down.

Anyway, I've just posted this on the chance that somebody else might have the same problem sometime and do a Google search, and also to add to the knowledge of the guys on this forum who try to help folk like me.

 

Great. Thanks for the follow up.