It would be great to download drivers that sped up your hard-disk access by 10's of percent wouldn't it? Well perhaps you can, Intel has made their Application Accelerator (IAA) available since last September. It reduces storage sub-system bottlenecks apparently. If you have a compatible Intel chipset (810 to 860) and a Pentium Celeron, III , 4 or Xeon chip then get on down to :

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa

Read through everything before you start downloading and installing. You may need to pre-install the Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility if you have XP running on a 830 or 845 chipset. Intel also provide a chipset identification utility if your unsure of what you have - it's linked from the same page.

Intel claim very significant increases in boot times and application speed. On a personal note, on my P4 2GHz, applications do start a lot faster. I suggest you do some benchmarking first (a stopwatch is an easy way to measure boot time). I would be interested in results people have had. This also works for 98SE,ME,NT4 and 2000.

NOTE: IAA works well for most, but not all. Judge for youself. It's easy enough to uninstall if you don't like it.