Yesterday I noticed my system resources were at an all time low of 24% :dead: I uninstalled some worthless/unused programs, and that freed it up to 48%.
I thought that was fine, until today, I notice it's back down to 31%.
Something's eating it up! Is there a known program that does this? What can I do about it?? Most of my friends have it in the upper 80's - lower 90's range...
I've been considering a reformat, but I don't have anywhere to put my sensitive materials that aren't replaceable

Well there could be a number of things causing your problem but from the outset, if I could refer to the quote I have made from your post, I think its a fairly good idea to have a seperate partition for important user data, downloaded files, etc that's seperate from the operating system.

for about 6 years now, this has been my d: drive. Here resides all of my downloads, favourates, documents, mp3s, etc. The thinking here is that if I wish to reinstall I merely have to reformat the OS partition and then press on, without having the tedious and sometimes difficult task of finding a home for the user data on my HDD prior to the reinstallation.

put simply, having all of your hard drive as one great whopping c: drive is a very bad idea in my opinion.

when I started at my current work they loved this idea, and its now the excepted model for an OS installation. this idea can be expanded to include:

-A games only partition
-A swap file only partition
-A partition for downloads (broadband users might like this)
-A possible extra partition for assembling CD layouts prior to burning.

I haven't focused on solving your particular problem in my reply here because i think that its likely you will be reformatting and reinstalling again some time soon anyway. what i am pointing out is that the next time you do it might be wiser to anticipate that reinstallation is a kind of inevitable thing with windows and that more sensibly partitioning for better data organisation is perhaps in order.

In the beginning when I had a single HDD I used seperate partitions but I later expanded this model to include 1 HDD for operating systems and 1 for data, etc.

Ultimately with software such as drive image www.powerquest.com its desireable to maintain a seperate data partition for making drive images onto of OSs installed on other partitions. I have been doing this for a while. When i am now faced with the kind of problem you are having right now and don't have the time to investigate i can roll back to a last good known image. if that still has the problem i can go back further.

thusly one spends less time reformatting and reinstalling and more time using the computer (a lot of my early days of windows 95 use were characterised by repeatedly formatting and reinstalling after any major problem or experiment such as ie4 installation, etc....)

I have data on my system that I have managed to keep from this time, even in the face of, over the years, some fairly catastrophic events. Mostly I attribute this to the seperate data partition model which i believe to be a strong one.

Ah yes. I was thinking about doing this.

I mean, having a partition (5 GB) for my OS, and 15 GB for my junk (games, mp3s, ripped DVDs, etc.). But since my HD is soooo small :dead: I never got around to it...

Actually it used to be that I had my primary HD, which is a 10GB, be my OS drive and my secondary, 20GB, was everything else. But now my 10GB is for Linux

My plan is to buy a new CPU and video card for my birthday, in 2 months, then a gargantuan HD and/or a monitor for Christmas

For now...Once I get home I'll reformat/reinstall and dump whatever I really can't replace into my Linux drive...Risky, but I won't be starting Linux during that period.

It's resolved. Thanks phant

I would suggest that, if you have 2 hard drives, instead of having 1 windows partition with windows and data on one drive and linux on another drive, that you instead:

have first drive as OS drive, split between windows and linux, and use the 2nd drive for data.

Ok how about this...

Since Windows doesn't recognize my Linux drive and I can't dump my stuff in there, I'm just going to partition my 10GB with Linux, reinstall it, and then install Windows onto it's partition. Then erase any sign of Windows on my 20GB. Not having to dump my sensitive files anywhere

if it was me, I would be using the 10 GB as primary master and splitting it into 2 partitions, 1 for windows and 1 for linux.

the 20 GB used for data and games.

That's what I'm doing, Phant, 5GB for Linux and 5GB for Windows, plus the 20. Not to mention that 200GB I'm gonna get for Christmas

now, if you had drive image then when you got the 200 GB you could make that your data drive, and then make the 20 your OS drive, and not have to reinstall anything because you would have images you could restore on the data drive and you could temporarily have all three HDDs in your machine to transfer data, i.e:

1)Temporarily fit the new 200 GB in anywhere (doesn't have to be fixed in with screws.) Partition and format it.

2)In Windows copy the contents of your 20GB data drive to the 200 GB drive (hopefully your 200GB will not be all one great stupid partition.... )

3)Powerdown and remove the smallest drive, the 10, fit the 20 in its place and fit the 200 where the 20 was.

4)Boot from a DOS disk and fire up drive image, there will be copies of your OS images which were on the 20 now on the 200.

5)Restore your images from the 200 to the 20.

6)Reboot - all is now as it was, except that you have a LOT more HDD space....

Something important to remember is that when you image a drive, you not only copy the contents of the drive but also any problems it has.

Example: If you have a drvie that has structural problems and you image that drive and copy it to another, then that corrupted space that was unusable on the old drive will also be flagged as the same on the new drive even though there is nothing wrong with the new drive.