This is more than likely a swapping issue. Check both your OS's and see which one swaps the most.
XP will tend to boot up swapping unless you have a boatload of RAM.
Exactly. Windows doesn't use a fixed swap space by default. It dynamically allocates hard drive space as its needed. Windows file systems, even NTFS get slow as they fragment. Unix systems are much less subject to fragmentation. So a fragemented drive, which for a 6gb drive on XP with a bunch of patches that has seen some use, the paging is going to beat the hard drive hard. Unix uses a seperate fixed paging/swap partition. The swap file system is placed in an efficient location on the hard drive. So page reads and writes are rather fast regardless of the drive age and file fragementation.
Most experienced windows people who have been around Windows for years have learned to change the default behavior of Windows virtual memory from dynamic to fixed, though with NT/2000/XP, Microsoft made it a bit harder and more hidden to change to fixed.
Try defragging the windows drive, then allocating a fixed paging size. That should help out the windows drive quite a bit.
Rob
