answer:Yes, the hard drive can slow things down very badly. I had an ten-year old laptop running Windows XP, the processor was an AMD Turion 64 Mobile ML-28 which I think would be slower than your 1.6 GHz Pentium dual core. I replaced the hard drive for more space, I wasn’t really thinking about speed. I cloned the XP installation onto the new drive, so there were no changes other than the HD. The machine ran MUCH faster. For web browsing, Excel, it was perfectly suitable for every day us. I would still be using it if the power connector hadn’t melted.