I have both XP Home and 2000 Pro installed on my laptop. XP Home, doesn't work. When I start-up my laptop, I have a black screen with the option to select XP Home or 2000 Pro. If I select XP Home, I get a message "Cannot start disk because of computer hardware configuration problem". Can't I just remove XP Home from my computer? Also, would this be contributing to how slow it runs?

Windows 2000 will run separately from XP, so it shouldn't be contributing to how slow your computer runs.

To fix that you should do some maintenance, such as running antivirus, ad-adware, spybot, and ccleaner. Defrag the drive, delete temp files, and review the background services running and disable the unnecessary ones.

Normally in a dual boot situation, XP will be on one partition, 2000 will be on another. There will also be two boot.ini files, one of which loads up when you get the boot menu choice as you described.

See here for help on accessing the boot.ini file.

Open boot.ini file from the w2k partition, and then open the one from the XP home partition.

If the XP Home boot.ini has two entries, then its okay. Leave it. (we'll delete it later).

If the W2K boot.ini has two entries, then delete the windows xp entry, and ensure default= to the W2K partition. Save.

Run "diskmgmt.msc" at the run command prompt. Look for the XP partition and delete it. MAKE SURE YOU DELETE THE RIGHT PARTITION!

Hide the protected files again.

Reboot, and it should now automatically boot into Windows 2000.