[netyuppie]

i'm having a really strange problem with my computer. about a week back it started acting strange. i was playing a fairly resource-hog of a game and listening to MP3s via foobar in the background. have done this with the same game for years with no problems. all of a sudden the music started skipping and the game was running very slow. rebooted after that and it was taking a lot longer to boot than normal. everything before the windows splash screen loads about thye same speed, but the windows screen takes about 3 minutes to finish. once windows is actually running, it takes another 2 or 3 minutes for all the tray icons to load (i dont have that many - maybe 8 or 9 loading). never had any troubles like this before with the machine. i keep pretty good care of my computer and am fairly experienced in maintanence/diagnostics.

i first thought it was a problem with my processor, so i checked it out. ran sisoftware sandra and it reported my v-core (i beleive? admit i dont know much what this is. power going to CPU?) was above rated maximum. i found out how to changed it & did so. problem remains.

a friend of mine thought it deffinatly sounded like a failing HD, and as skepitcal as i was (only running 1 HD, not even 6 months old), i set out to work on that next. first ran spinrite (never used it before - it took about 18 hours to completly scan a 300gb drive, this normal?) and it reported nothing wrong. next i ran chkdsk (took about 24 hours!) and it fixed some bad sectors relating to restore points. i then defraged (use diskeeper), which also reported the MFT was 84% full, so i expanded it.

safe to say (i hope) its not the hard drive. next thought was bad memory. i ran a program that measures used/free RAM for awhile, and with 1gb of RAM, right when windows starts already about 45% of that is used. when doing something like playing a game it shows less that 1% free. are these normal %'s? never really payed attention when it was running fine. RAM all checks out (so i think) besides one warning in sandra reading "large memory sizes should be made of registered/buffered memory)". not sure what to make of this.

anyone still with me? any ideas? im really stumped. it will still boot up and run, but everything takes at least 3x as long as it should. its just slow and i have no idea why. all temps are well within safe limits. have AVG and NOD32 running and full scan. virus free. have checked for spyware with 3 or 4 programs as well. all that was found was non critical. i'm gonna run a CPU test tonight and see if it has anything to say.