Hi to you all and thanks in advance for reading and helping me in any way you can. I made myself (about 2 years and a half ago) a desktop with an Asus Socket 939 MoBo with an AMD64 3500+ processor and 3 GB of RAM. Graphics are provided by e-GeForce 6200 (256MB) and the HD's are SATA, one of 200Gb and the other one 300Gb. At first I only had 1 GB of RAM but about 5 months ago I upgraded to 3 GB. No hassle and the computer has been running very good. I use it with a lot of audio software and have never had a single problem. About 3 weeks ago I've been noticing a serious lag whenever I open any kind of application.
It doesn't matter if it's an application that uses lots of resources or at the other end, light applications. It just spends about a minute or more until the application opens. The funny thing is that once the application is open, it works perfectly with the performance I expect from it. Memory is working fine, I even switched slots, removed memory cards, tried different combinations but obtained the same results. With that troubleshoot I think I can discard memory problems. Also there are no tasks eating my memory or CPU.
I do have a whole lot of applications installed, but of course, they don't start on boot. Most of them are VSTi plugins I use for audio production (as a hobby). The only tasks that run at startup are Zone Alarm Security Suite, Powerchute battery back-up software, Object Dock Plus, Style XP and the M-Audio audio interface software. None of them have ever given me a problem and I haven't made any changes that could be suspect of causing the lag. That is why I'm clueless.
The usual maintenance has been made: defragmenting, registry cleanup, registry optimization, temp file and cookie cleanup, virus scan and spyware scan. Tha last two with Zone Alarm. I don't know what else to check and I have Googled with no results. Luckily I found this forum to see if someone can help me figure this out. After a reformat I made a year ago, I had to spend about 3 to 4 weeks re-installing all my software and I don't want to do that again. Could this be a HD problem or could it be a Winodws problem? Remember that the only problem is the time that applications take to load, but after loading, they run fast and smooth. Thanks in advance to all comments. I'll be checking this tomorrow.
It doesn't matter if it's an application that uses lots of resources or at the other end, light applications. It just spends about a minute or more until the application opens. The funny thing is that once the application is open, it works perfectly with the performance I expect from it. Memory is working fine, I even switched slots, removed memory cards, tried different combinations but obtained the same results. With that troubleshoot I think I can discard memory problems. Also there are no tasks eating my memory or CPU.
I do have a whole lot of applications installed, but of course, they don't start on boot. Most of them are VSTi plugins I use for audio production (as a hobby). The only tasks that run at startup are Zone Alarm Security Suite, Powerchute battery back-up software, Object Dock Plus, Style XP and the M-Audio audio interface software. None of them have ever given me a problem and I haven't made any changes that could be suspect of causing the lag. That is why I'm clueless.
The usual maintenance has been made: defragmenting, registry cleanup, registry optimization, temp file and cookie cleanup, virus scan and spyware scan. Tha last two with Zone Alarm. I don't know what else to check and I have Googled with no results. Luckily I found this forum to see if someone can help me figure this out. After a reformat I made a year ago, I had to spend about 3 to 4 weeks re-installing all my software and I don't want to do that again. Could this be a HD problem or could it be a Winodws problem? Remember that the only problem is the time that applications take to load, but after loading, they run fast and smooth. Thanks in advance to all comments. I'll be checking this tomorrow.