I read an article on viahardware.com that suggested a huge performance boost would be evident if I upgraded my 2 HDDs to dynamic disks.

This I did only to discover that not only was there NO noticable difference in speed but my page file usage had increased (for no reason that I can yet deduce by nearly 20mb overall, ie on the whole programs tend to be using more VM than they should really need) In particular the main culprits are explorer.exe and svchost.exe, which is odd because I turned off all the GUI bloat I could manage without and have disabled most of the unessary background services.

My disks are in this configuration:

DISK0: (C Simple Dynamic (MBR) NTFS (System) 28642Mb 25% Free Space [Maxtor 5T030H3, ATA-133, 7200rpm, Primary Master]

DISK1: (D Simple Dynamic (MBR) NTFS 19540Mb 22% Free Space [Maxtor 52049H4, ATA-100, 7200rpm, Secondary Master]

My 2nd drive which i use just for file storage (D is a compressed disk, and the C: drive uses file compression in certain directories.

Now aside laughing at my stupidity can anyone tell me what might be done to improve the situation at all?

There is no performance increase at all as far as I am aware of. The proper place to get such info would be here or @ storagereview....that's about it.

As for helping you out with the speed increase....there shouldn't be any decrease in speed going from basic to dynamic...just a loss of compatibility. In the times that I have used dyanmic (very few..since there is no need to use it) I have noticed no performance difference. Are you running the latest SP and do you have benchmarks? Perhaps something else messed up the system but you might think it's the basic->dynamic conversion?

There is no performance decrease or increase that I am aware of... however page file usaged has increased since the upgrade...

and im not sure what else it could be since I noticed the difference through taskmaner's performance tab after a direct reboot