[RalliArt882]

Hi, I built my gaming rig last christmas, and it has served me pretty well except for one annoying problem. And frankly, it's starting to get very old.

Basically, when I start some programs, my computer seems non-responsive when I click the icon. This happens on games too. For example, I'll double-click Toca Race Driver 3 on my desktop, and hear cpu activity for a bit. Then, nothing will happen for several minutes. I'll just be sitting on my desktop.

It's as if I never launched the program in the first place. Out of frustration, I'll click the icon again, to have the same situation duplicated. Next, I CTRL+ATL+DEL, only to see "racedriver.exe" on my apps :x . Finally, 10 minutes later, the program will actually execute and I'll see the game running. In fact, I make a habit to leave my room for a bit when I launch games such as Race Driver 3, BF2142, and CS Source, because of the time I spend waiting for them to really launch onto my screen.

This happens in more than just games. My rig acts like it's down-right bogged when running other programs. I find myself closing internet explorer windows all of the time due to them not responding. I had to configure my microphone yesterday, only to find the wizard crash on me two or three times.

I really don't know where to start if this is a hardware issue. My old Pentium4 HP wouldn't do anything as odd as this, ever. I ran two instances of memtest overnight, and it returned no errors. I'm using Windows MCE 2005, thanks for your help

[Cappy]

Try running memtest you may have some memory problems developing .
You can run scandisk or the western digital utility to check your drive on boot up .You may have an OS corruption problem or virus . Also look at your power monitor in BIOS make sure your voltages look ok .

[RalliArt882]

Ok I ran memtest and it returned no errors. Voltages in BIOS seem ok. I have not overclocked this machine, so I never changed them. After running scandisk, it returned this. "Windows was unable to complete the check"



I can't help but believe this isn't a good sign...

[poorman]

Is your boot drive the same drive you run your games off of? Does your machine act the same for every app you try to run or just a couple games you have?

[RalliArt882]

Yes I only have one HDD. So I run games and everything. No, it doesn't act the same with all programs...all of the time anyway. It's probably something with my OS. I just defragged my HDD, and now I'm working on disabling startup services. I've cut my commit charge down quite a bit by doing it, and I'm only halfway done. I'll update again soon.