Is fragmentation still an issue with M$ stuff? In the old days a reload didnt resolve dire fragmentation ~ typically on FAT32 gear, its not SO bad on NTFS but... Cant really offer much specific help with your Vista machine, I piqued [pun intended] at w2k pro sp4. The workstations have remained at that level ever since;~) Although I still build my own workstation and server boxes using the available Asus/Intel gear-of-the-moment. Your HDD capacity seems well under resourced, this WILL give you issues photoshopping and flinging images and other stuff around. Green drives are just that ~ green, theyre not all that fast. Theres a bunch of them in my server and a couple more in one of the workstations. They run cool and quiet but not fast. However your virtual drives must be flickering all the time and it is THAT that really slows things down ~ all that unproductive shuffling about of programmes and content. Photoshopping really needs multiple drives and a strategy locating the various stuff to different drives along with actually specifying proper M$ TMP (paging) areas (dedicated static not that default dynamic stuff). Of course your biggest Big Issue is the one youll never fix (Vista)... Dont hold your breathe on Win7 either. From what Ive read on some (RSS) feeds its actually turning out to look a bit slower even than Vista. Oh and dont forget any A/Virus stuff you may have got running full time as theyre REAL killers in terms of performance. With on-line updaters [sic] happening at any time youve no real feel for what mightve just been downloaded (ie after the reload)... If you want to control your stuff you have to wrest control of it away from all the entities that have, over the years, been allowed to get control of it ~ all in the name of techno-illogical advancement [sic] and increased user experience (whatever that marketing-speak means).

Does your HDD activity light flicker an awful lot?

I think the point he is trying to make is Malware/Virus. But you have confirmed that the computer is slow after reformatting, so i highly doubt its that.

Its more the case, of the HDD feature i pointed out earlier, or the fact that updates since release of Vista have bloated it out slowing performance.

Yeah, I gave disabling the AAM a go but I cant get it to stick. Hitachi have disabled the AAM management tool in their feature tool, so I had to hunt around for something that would do it, but it doesnt seem to work.

As to the hdd light flickering, it flickers whenever I do something which would require hdd activity. Ill need to wait for it to go sluggish again before seeing if the light stays on then.

Sluggishness I define as being little things taking much longer than they should.

Things like opening firefox, and a new tab, can take more than 10 seconds on occasion. Closing iTunes, which I know is kind of bloated anyway, often it will keep playing for 10+ seconds before closing. Taking 5x as long to load MS word as it used to.

I do often tend to refresh apps like you say with PS. Current work often has me opening 100+ tabs in firefox and bookmarking them all to sort out later. Even after closing all but 1 tab after it tends to perform badly till I close it down and reopen FF.  I should add that the lag/sluggishness actually doesnt happen when I am doing this, it does it when only 1 or 2 tabs are open usually.

It probably is just down to needing another reformat and OS updates etc. There are some programs installed on this comp which are a nuisance to install and generate a lot of files in the process, so that could be the cause too. Once the other drive comes Ill try Win 7 and though it wont be possible to do a direct comparison, if the same apps are being slow in win 7 Ill know its hardware related. Will try to give the inside a dust out as well when I install the drive.

Maybe its just me imagining things, refusing to acknowledge that software has progressed and my computer is 2 years old now and starting to show its age.

Aye. Tbh Ive never had much issue with PSs speeds. It take a while to load at the start, but not really any different to other "big" programs. Generally the photos and images I work on are rapid too, in the sense that unless I have 30x 10mp photos open at a time, the filters and loading are instantaneous.

The large files I am talking about are GIS files in programs like ArcGIS. Working on layered satellite imagery of the UK, or word, etc. ArcGIS is also the program which has sunk its teeth into the OS, takes a ridiculous time to install due to all the files it put on my system.

Swap file wise, is that the same as a page file? Dxdiag reckons Im using 3078mb and have 5305mb available.

Depending on financial situation I might also upgrade my ram to 8gb of Crucial 800mhz ram.

Might be worth running a perfmon for a while...

Are you sure youve got all your motherboard drivers installed properly? I remember forgetting the via 4in1s back in the days and it being really slow.

What Piran says is true - set a fixed swap file, but Vista is just plain crap =- tbh Id get Win7 or x64.

Aye, will have a look at the swap file thingy, just got back from my siss and am formatting the 1tb drive now.

ArcGIS is an evil, bloated piece of software. Its one of those things where just because the min specs are quite low, doesnt mean you should even consider using them. Its a bit like doing 3D rendering with a min spec, or worse spec, computer. Itll do it, but it could take 24 hours to process a file (seriously!). Worst Ive had with my comp is 30 mins to render a single map, and having to do that for about 50 maps.

I have just found the page file settings in control panel, and can change it from system managed to custom initial&max size. Any recommendations on size of the page file?

Looked at the ArcGIS site, its even OK to use it with my ancient w2k. My point with the swap/temp/paging issue needs you to get into the system control area not just find out how much is in use or available. Its how it is set up not how much is in use. If it remains at the default of dynamic you are very likely to get pregnant periods of nothing much apparently happening ie system latency. Particularly if you are habitually throwing huge files and/or busy programmes in and out... Its a control panel thing, you set up up the minimum or starting value to be ?MB (not the usual 1MB) and the maximum value to be the same ?Mb. That way there is no rubber banding of swap file capacity and, depending on your resources, less latency. What you lose is that amount of HDD space that is permanently allocated to the now unchanging swapfile. M$ usually defaults to dynamic, its a hangover from the old days.

My level of windows does not fully respond to even 4GB let alone 8GB so Im unable to properly comment. My gut feeling is that you very probably do need more memory for your GIS stuff. When I had 2GB installed my various cameras RAW file rendering performance was excrutiatingly slow ~ much HDD LED flickering. Even with what I had then thought was ample memory the renderer got badly paged by the OS. Installing another 2GB (despite it NOT being fully recognised by the M$ OS) freed things up massively and the HDD activity LED barely flickers while the RAW is rendered into a 120MB TIFF. As maxing out w2k with 4GB of RAM was mandatory here, given the widely acknowledged bloat factor of Vista, I would imagine maxing that OS out for your GIS purposes is likely to be necessary.

Will it make any difference if I up the page file to 16gb (I will be sorting out 8GB of ram...just got a share dividend so might as well up that)... Or should I do 8gb now, and then up to 16gb when the new ram is in?