Now to show just how much of a noob I am with computers

Running Vista home premium 64 bit. To start with when first built, the comp was running nice and smoothly. However it started to slow down a bit, and maybe 12 months after building it, I reformatted it. After reformatting, it still didnt run "as new" and became sluggish much more quickly. Id understand if it was because resources were maxed out, but generally task manager etc reports about 50% ram usage (unless photoshopping), and the CPU hardly ever maxes out, going between 25-50% on both cores when doing things. The problem is though, things liek firefox are getting a bit unstable where Id open a new tab, or go between tabs, and firefox will become unresponsive for maybe 10 secs and then load. Word sometimes doesnt load properly when opening a file, and it takes an absolute age to boot up fully (several minutes).

Specs are (Copied from order histories):

ASUS P5KC AiLifestyle Series iP35 Socket 775 8 channel audio ATX
Intel E6400 (2.13ghz)
2x 500gb Western Digital Sata II drives, both have about 90gb left (WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA II 7200RPM 16MB Cache)
EVGA 8800GTS SuperClocked 320MB DDR3 DVI PCI-E
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Gold XTC Memory CL5
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Platinum XTC Memory Kit CL4 2.1V
Antec EarthWatts 500W 80%+ Efficiency PSU - 80mm Fan 4x SATA 2x PCI-E

Could it be that either the ram, or the CPU, is dying/corrupt? Its the only thing I can think of that could have caused it to get sluggish pretty much straight after reformatting. Theres nothing that loads in background that takes up loads of resources etc. I might try and run memtest tonight to see what that thinks, as I have the bios running the ram at 2.1v, and theres 2 different kinds of OCZ ram in there.

Any suggestions on what to look at, or upgrade, welcome. Is it possible to run a test like memtest, but for Intel CPUs to see if they are damaged or anything?

Aye, I am kind of hoping that Windows 7 may make things run smoother. But before I do that I want to add another drive to my computer as theyre getting full. One of the buggers about the GIS work I do is I end up with files that are 15gb big quite often

There is an obscene amount of files on my windows drive, so perhaps one of the first programs I installed has sunk its claws into the OS and is grinding things to a halt :/

Give server 2008 a try if you get a spare few hrs- I noticed a desktop experience thing in it today and reading up it supposedly goes like stink compared to Vista. You can get a long trial of it free from ms website.

http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/

Vista.

I was wondering how long itd be before someone said that >< (RE: Vista)

Vista, as with almost all M$ operating systems, gets more bloated as you go along, which will reduce the speed. There also seems to be a subjective drop in performance with computers, even if the speed isnt anything less a year or more of use and it will still seem slower.

Just ordered a WD 1TB Green drive. Once its in Ill dual/triple boot the machine, with Vista on 1 500gb drive, and Windows 7 and maybe Ubuntu on the other 500gb drive, with all movie/pictures/music etc on the 1tb drive.

zpyder

click start
run
type in msconfig then hit return

under the startup tab click disable all
under the services tab click hide all MS services then click disable all

see if that makes any difference ?


itll disable everything at startup... including stuff like anti virus etc... but its best to disable everything (restart) then go back and see if theres anything you need... dont be worried by names you recognise etc.. just dump the lot !