Poor system performance, even after reinstall

[chawknz]

Hey everyone..

Been having an issue with my system performing very poorly. It's hard to explain what's happening, but it seems whenever I try to open a program, install something, close out of a game, the system just likes to hang for a few moments before doing what it needs to do.

I was running XP and experiencing this problem, so I decided to "upgrade" to Vista and I am having the same issues. I did the built in benchmark in Vista, and no areas are showing any significant slowdown, as the lowest score I earned was 5.3 .. 3D performance is great, hard drive performance is great, etc.

There's got to be some hardware issue that's causing me to slow down. Never had this problem up until about a month ago. Anyone know where I should begin looking?

This is a home built machine.. all the fans inside seem to be running good, my average CPU temp is 43c...Video card is around 50-70c..

Even now, I am trying to copy 86 gigs of Data and it's showing there's 14 days left on the copy. When I run games, I don't experience any system issues except for when I try to close out. Crysis for example just hangs at a black screen for about a minute before showing me the desktop. It's like a car that has trouble getting up to speed, but once it's there, it's fine.

Biostar 945P-A7A w/ Core2Duo E6600 (2.4GHz)
Using onboard sound and Ethernet
PNY Optima 2GB (4 x 512MB) DDR2 667
Soundblaster Audigy 2
GeForce 8800GT 512MB
PLEXTOR 16X DVD±R IDE Model PX-716A/SW
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB / 7200 RPM
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB / 7200 RPM

 

[HardwareGuru]

Well...there are several possible cause that may cause a PC to run slower down the road. These would be

1. Disk space is running full. Your Harddisk maybe running short on available disk space
2. Spyware, Adware or Virus infecting the computer.
3. Data Corruption.
4. Computer is overheating.
5. Bad Hardware.
6. Programs that have been installed/uninstalled may leave behind bad files that maybe confusing the software.
7. Registry in the system becomes corrupt.
8. Fragmented Harddrive.
9. Programs running in the background.


One of these maybe contributing to your slowdowns. Go over these and see if this helps.

 

[chawknz]

Thanks for the response..

Considering I was having the problem with XP and the same problem the moment my clean install of Vista booted up, I'm pretty sure it's not a software issue. The poor performance was happening even before I installed anything.

Was thinking about overheating, so just looking at the video card, motherboard, and CPU temps, everything looks normal there.

Thinking it has to be some weird hardware issue, but I am not sure what I can test to find out what it is. I suppose I can rip apart my system and just keep the primary hard drive and video card in to see how the system runs just like that..

Was just curious if there was a #1 top hardware reason that'll slow the computer down like it's doing. Like I said, it only happens when the computer tries to open a program, close a program, copy files, etc.. once the operation is loaded, everything is fine.

 

[HardwareGuru]

What you can do is a process of elimination on the hardware components. If you have other components to swap, try doing this. This will allow you to pinpoint the particular hardware component that maybe causing this.