Wubi slowdown or freeze

[forpeterssake]

I have tried to use Wubi several times on my laptop, with little success. Most of the time I can successfully install Wubi, but when I attempt to use Ubuntu it runs so slowly that it takes more than half an hour to get past the login screen. I have tried installing Ubuntu and Xubuntu with the same results, although the most recent attempt with Xubuntu resulted in normal use for about five minutes before it slowed to a crawl, which continued for all subsequent boots. It runs so slow that it hangs up if I try to start any program.

There may be some hardware conflicts, since my laptop is an off-brand with less common hardware and drivers. I have installed Ubuntu 6.06 on it in the past, although I did have some trouble with the install. However, the recent experience with normal use on Xubuntu makes me think it may not be a purely hardware problem. Any thoughts anyone?

My laptop's stats:
1.6 GHz processor (2800+ AMD Sempron)
480 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2
80 GB HD

[ago]

It might be an issue with the hard disk driver. If you run some benchmarks/check resource utilization it might be easier to spot the problem