Eddy
2
I have no more installations available on my Windows XP Product Key
1 license = 1 install, unless you have a corporate license for multiple systems.
I want to have Windows power down disks after 1 minute to reduce the bearing wear on the HDD
Don't worry about that. A hd bearing will normally last longer than you will become. Stopping/starting will shorten the lifespan more than keeping it running.
I used Norton Ghost to ghost the contents of the C: drive to H:, the SSD. Using Regedit, I changed the few instances of "C:"
to "H:", and it seems to be working passably fair - hiccups, but no complete chokes.
Norton ghost? I think you mean Symantec since Norton has been taken over by Symantec many years ago. C: is normally the main boot drive, so if you "ghost" it to H (the SSD), you should set H: (the ssd) as boot device in the bios. There is no need to change anything in the registry.
But something accesses the HDD intermittently, which causes some long hangs while waiting for the HDD to spin up.
Ofcourse something does. It is the bios. You haven't changed the settings in there to change the boot device to H: (the ssd) and besides that, it is very likely your bios is set to automaticly search/check for devices.
Best thing to do is start from scratch. Change bios settings so that the ssd is C: (main boot device) and do a clean install of windows. That will make sure that there will be no rubbish on the drive/in the registry which can/will cause slowdowns/problems
The things/problems you see have nothing to do with avast! but with the way you did things.