My XP box is starting to slow down

I don't know if it's the box itself, my experience running it, or "other," but the XP box (Dell Optiplex GX520, Pentium 4 processor at 3 GHz, 512 MB RAM) is starting to slow down.

I can't switch between windows as quickly, there's a lot of disk accessing going on, and it's just not as good of an experience as I remember.

It could be that I've been using it for more than two years now, and I don't have administrator privileges on it. That means I can't use the disk tools to defragment the hard drive, which I suspect would clear up the problem considerably. As would a total reinstall of Windows.

But here we're not even allowed to back up our hard drives. We can only back up what we can fit on CDs, and I have MUCH more than that. Of course most of that is Linux and BSD ISO files, which I don't really "need," as most are already burned to CD or can be downloaded again.

But since I don't have access to my own on-board tools -- and believe me, there's nobody here doing any kind of preventive maintenance whatsoever -- I'll just have to live with it.

If only Windows had a filesystem (like those in Linux, BSD and the BSD-based Apple OS X) that wasn't prone to fragmentation. Vista was supposed to get one, but it didn't happen in time. And can you imagine how much louder the complaining would be if people had a whole new, non-NTFS filesystem to deal with. They had enough problem going from FAT to NTFS.

But Windows -- and computers in general -- desperately need better (read: quicker and more reliable) filesystems. There's just too much data loss and corruption going on out there for it to be any other way. New CPUs, greater amounts of memory, faster graphics systems ... it all pales in the face of filesystems that need to grow in size, function and, again, sheer reliability as we go forward.