Hi just installed Windows XP Pro on a Dell Dimension 3000 with 1 gig RAM. This machine was running W2000 pro with no problems. But after formatting the drive and installing Windows XP pro and all updates the Maxtor 5T040H4 hard drive is running very slow. IE takes close to a minute to open. Window Explorer takes 30 seconds. Solitair takes a full 15 seconds. I have run diskcleaner, ccleaner, registry cleaner, defrag as well as tweakUI and disabled all unnecessary programs. Downloaded and installed all available drivers from Dell. Any advice? Sincerely Peter [email protected]

Did you run Chkdsk utility finds the bad sectors and marks them restricted moves what data it can and restores it.
If this is a fresh install run this chkdsk from dos prompt
[start, run, <open> CMD type in at the prompt chkdsk, follow instructions.after that it will read write to the disk sector at a time and will find any bad sectors by comparing.
After it is finished a report may show and bad sectors
Reboot and see if that helps.
Another thing to investigate is to see what resouces are monopolizing the system
Get into task manager

Well you definately tried everything I would have sudgested.
It sounds like the Hard drive is near the end of its life.
If you have only just installed windows, it may be worth getting a new drive, installing your OS on that, you could then use the other drive as extra storage.
I have had a few HD that started to fail. Maybe the format and installation pushed it over the edge. You could always run maxtors drive check tool to see if it can detect a problem.( maxtor is now seagate)
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools