looking foward to hearing about some tips

Also, I wanted to add that you could backup your files and format the drive, then kill the services you don't need which are recommended off the blackviper.com site. Sahir's post also talks about some services you could kill to speed up XP.

A fresh hard drive will always show some serious speed gains since there is no clutter on the hard drive. Combining both a fresh hard drive and minimum services, you are surely going to see results.

If you tread formatting, you might want to look into ghosting your system at its best point. Then you could just slap that on every once in awhile, and add the programs you need.


ZiPPy

There are a lot of things to do. Clean up registry from old values that aren't being used anymore. Adding more memory is always good, if you have enough memory you don't need the pagefile which is slower because hd's are much slower than RAM. Also removing fonts can speedup the bootprocess. You could also reinstall XP on a RAID 0 drive. This would give you a nice boost in performance.