computer feels "sluggish"

[MetalDwarf]

hi

my computers (both) have been feeling sluggist lately. it seems to take longer then it should to do small things like open firefox, or winamp, or any number of small what i would concider "easy" programs. games and media encoding and all the [H]ard stuff seems to be just as fast as it ever was. now am i getting impatient or is there something i can do about this

my main computer is a laptop so i have limited upgrade path but im thinking it might be more software related then anything.

laptop specs:
centrino 1.73ghz
1gb ram
80gb HDD seagate momentus 7200rpm (fastest laptop drive around)
windows XP and Vista 5384 dual boot

both xp and vista seem sluggish.
i thought at first it might have been my old hard drive which was 5400rpm and slow not to mention dieing on me. but even the new drive doesnt seem to speed things up that much.

now before you jump to conculsions my desktop also seems too slow to me.
athlon 64 1.4ghz
1gb ram
segate 250gb sata drive

both these systems should be plenty fast as opening winamp or word. both are clean of viruses and spyware, they still seem slowish even after a fresh install of the OS. are there any tweaks that might speed things up

better yet any diagnostic software that might point me in the right direction

 

[djnes]

Did you load the chipset drivers right away on both systems? What measurements are you using to decide they both "seem" slow?

 

[MetalDwarf]

measurement is mearly my own patience.
ie: i just loaded winamp after a clean reboot and it took ~7 seconds for it to load. on a 1.73ghz CPU that seems slow to me

 

[MetalDwarf]

it seems like its using the hard disk a lot. i wonder if its using the swapdisk more then it should i have 768MB of ram after the 256MB shared to the onboard X300 gfx card

and task manager doesnt say that im out of physical ram. is there a way i can tell windows to use more physical ram and less swapdisk?

 

[mwarps]

Do you defrag?

If not, it might cause that sort of terrible load time.