ORIGINAL: Nikademus
it was a Seagate Barracuda 160GB drive.
Strange that the performance suddenly degraded so much that FirmWare upgrade was the only thing to do...
BTW, how is the FirmWare installed - was it windows installer?
If yous the best solution for such insufficient privileges are boot from removable media (USB, CD/DVD) with Mini WinXP (for example found on Hiren's Boot CD) - then just install needed FirmWare from there (and circumvent the low privilege account)...
Leo "Apollo11"