On Sun, 24 Sep 2017 17:21:55 -0400, John B. Smith
wrote:

Today my XP went off the tracks. I think it booted normally but when I
used Agent and Eudora to get hearders and check mail at the same time,
something got messed up bigtime. Agent seemed to freeze, but did work
after a while. Tried a reboot, things got stalled when my bat was
saving email. I finally pushed the Start Button to turn off. On reboot
things were REALLY messed up and Avast anti-virus refused to work. My
last Macrium backup was August 28, but it would have to do. And it
did, though I worked thru it painfully slow as I haden't done it in a
long time. Imaged the backup back on in 20 minutes. Took a long bootup
but everything looked normal. Messed a while with my saved email
rescuing stuff. I do have a bat but I don't trust it. Core Temp
reported 6% usage on both cores all the time???. Anyway, I thought I
better do a fresh Macrium backup. Got it started and saw the estimated
end time was 5 hours! HD Tune then said my 500G drive was running xfer
speedof 3 megabytes/sec! The 1 gig drive was its usual 170MB/sec.
Rebooted and all was ok.

Finally my question is why was the 500g boot drive running so slow on
its first boot after the recovery? Is that typical?

Something's off with those transfer speeds. Not that 170MB/sec is par
here, but by binary transfers of the OS, I regularly run at least a
couple times a month, take 45 seconds for close to a gigabyte over a
compressed Windows' image. Probably half your speeds when favoring
various SSD involvements with mechanical drives.

(I practice installing programs elsewhere, not on the same partitions
as the OS.)

You need to establish what's affecting the HDD. Whether software
drivers are off and settings wrong. I wouldn't necessarily suspect
cabling, ports, to the MB's controller chip. Nor the HDD,
particularly. Testing them may be involved, however. Also, it may
involve an OS reinstall if your imagery methods aren't proving to be
helpful. (I'm using imaging software from the mid-90s, and it's
always been a prime and crucial aspect to my ordering of dedicated
backups for the OS.)