This past weekend, my hard drive failed. Since I lost a lot of personal data, I decided to set up a RAID 1 disk array to minimize the chance of losing data in the future. I purchased two 120 GB Samsung SATA drives and reinstalled Windows XP Professional SP2. Everything seems to be running well except for file deletion in windows explorer. If I try to delete a folder containing only a few files, it can take well over a minute to delete the files (the more files, the worse the wait time). Previously (and with most other PCs I use), file deletion typically occurs almost instantaneously. In my problematic system, while the file and/or folder is being deleted, the taskmanager indicates that explorer.exe is consuming anywhere from 30 to 85% of the CPU resources. As a reality check, I placed an identical folder with over 100 MB of files both on my PC and on my laptop (both running XP). The laptop is much older and less capable. However, the laptop deletes the folder virtually instantaneously, while the PC takes a very long time. Here are a few things I have tried:
1) Made sure that the recycle bin is empty. This doesn't help.
2) Disabled the recycle bin. This does make things move faster, but file deletion it still takes much longer than on other systems. I personally wouldn't want this as a permanent solution because I couldn't easily recover a deleted file.
3) I ran "chkdsk c: /r" from a command line as suggested in
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_21089036.html, but everything checked out OK after the disk scan.
I would really appreciate help with this problem because I would like to avoid having to reinstall the OS, drivers, programs etc. just to find out that the problem is still there.
Here are a few of my system specs:
Windows XP Professional SP2
Pentium 4 2.80 GHZ 800 MHz FSB
2.0 GB RAM
120 GB RAID 1 hard drive (no partitions)
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe motherboard
