As of this evening Word is taking around 35 seconds to fire up whereas before it took just a second or two. The only change I have made is a reorganisation of the files on my hard disk. No idea if that's relevant. Any suggestions of what may have happened and how I can remedy it? I'm running XP and Office2000 Pro, fool that I am.
The key to answering this one is in the question. Mark says he reorganised his files - I'm betting he had a good clear out and deleted loads of old crap he didn't need any more.
In WinXP's file systems, a data file over a certain size is stored in several chunks or fragments rather than in a single contiguous sequence of bits in one place on the storage medium, a process that is called fragmentation.
If you delete files from your hard disk, you should also defragment the drive, this is because the files that have been deleted have freed up discontiguous space on the volume thus the next file that gets written is written to the newly free space - and immeadiately its fragmented and access times are slow as the disk head must jump from a to b and back again.
First things first, run the defragmentation tool that comes with Windows SeXwee, you can fire this up by right clicking My Computer, then selecting manage - its pretty obvious from there. Have a look at the display pane in the bottom view - this shows what portion of the allocation is used for system files - they're bright green on my client - if these are discontiguous across the volume then the likely reason for the slow down could be page file defragmentation. Now, the main detractor from the M$ tool that comes with Windows is that it is not possible to defrag a file that is in use, so you need this
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedefrag.shtml which is a tool that will not only sort out your page files but also your reg hives too.
Re: Bubba's idea about C, D and E - keeping everything separate - its a great idea to keep your data on a separate partition but don't be fooled into thinking that by installing all your programmes onto D that rebuilding onto C will restore all your apps - it won't! programs make registry entries that live on C! regular reg backups will sort this - but if you're so damn worried use the D partition for taking ghost images of the C - job done!
