I am an A+ certified tech who happened to buy this particular drive for home use. I also have had the same problems with the drive being slow. I of course overlooked the most obvious thing…If you get into device manager and click on that hard drive. In Windows Vista Choose the tab: Policies. When you see the 2 options click on Optimize for performance. Click OK and it will prompt you to restart the computer. Now i have this in a usb enclosure and this made my speed go through the roof…hence normal operation. I don’t have XP on my PC right now but it should be pretty similar in the steps. I hope this helps! Good Luck!