I built my CPU last spring and it is as follows...
Dua core 3mhz
2 gig memory
8800 GTS video card
1 SATA 500 gig drive
1 old IDE 350 gig drive (used for back up)


I have been having the slow downs hard core. Defrag has been going for 24+ hours and its only at 9%. Folders take 5 seconds to load and the icon pictures within the folders take about 10 seconds to appear. Games run fine and programs do to once they load, but its almost like the computer has a 5 second hicup every 10 seconds and freezes. I have ran registry fixer, spy bot, avg, I have ran tests on all my components with a program called cpu tester (r something like that). I was grabbing wi-fi spots within my neiborhood to get internet with a wireless usb adapter. Funny thing is this is when all the problems starting happening or at least getting worse after a couple weeks of installing the Belkin software for the usb adapter. For the past week I can't get a signal I usually could always get. I guess my question is should I just wipe the drives and start fresh? or should I try something else? Can anybody give me a better propgram to use other then D-Ban?

http://asknerd.net/slowcomputer.html
http://www.registrycleanerscomparisons.com/
http://www.tweak3d.net/joomla/twea [...] xp-tune-up

Usually in the past and after a year or so I D-Ban my drives to start fresh and new, but its only been 4 months and I really do not want to have to install everything again. Is D-Ban still the good method of wiping drives clean? I figure they maybe have a better way and/or a different program by now.

Disable System Restore.
Turn your Page File to "Let Windows Manage it" or change it to another drive letter.
Delete temporary files using the Disk Clean Up utility.

Go to a command prompt and run, "CHKDSK /F"

This will want to restart to run Check Disk with the Fix option. This may take 20-45 minutes to run through doing a complete repair on your HDD.

That should solve your problem unless your HDD is near death.

That would be odd if it were near death... Its a brand new WD sata drive.

They fail on brand new ones. Some get through inspection.. that's why they have a warranty.

how many running processes do you have when you open the task manager

a file in use cant be defraged and when there in use the defrag takes much longer

if you want you can go to start > run> type in msconfig> then disable all extra startup items and non microsoft services

then apply and restart

then do the defrag, after the defrag is done, you can set msconfig to normal if you want.

defrag harddrive in safe mode always

the computer rebooted in the middle of the defrag.... I used d-Ban on the drive and since I had such an old ver. 1.5.0(about 3-4 years old) they had poor drivers that wouldn't work well with SATA drives. I stopped the d-ban and just tried a fresh install of XP. Unfortunatley I need the internet to update windows to SP2 because any ver of windows before that will not regonize a HD over 130gigs.

The instyall went well besides having poor video card drivers, but I noticed something when I installed the Belkin software for my wireless usb adapter. Right after I installed it, my cpu started slowing way down. And now it is almost to the point where it was before I reformatted it. I can't think of anything else that halted my computer besides the Belkin software. Would anyone have any ideas as to why it would do this??? I currently go off unsecure networks in my area, but after a couple days I can't get on any of the networks I accessed before. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? With the Belkin Software or any wireless software?