Vista started running really slow overnight. Proc. at 100%, No VC.

AMD Opteron 165
Asus A8V Delux Mobo
Nvidia geforce 6800
2gig RAM corsair
Seagate PATA 500gig HDD


According to www.driveragent.com, i have all the correct drivers installed besides an SATA controller or two that vista won't support.


I had been running Vista for about a week and my computer was running well. I came to it in the morning and it was BSOD'ed. I rebooted and Vista was running extremely slow and i noticed that both cores on my processor were running at 100% when i wasn't doing anything. I tried a system restore and that seemed to work for about 30 seconds then when i opened a program and same thing. I ended up reformatting and installing vista again. Basically the same thing was happening, unusable computer. I turned off the aero theme for ***** and giggles and it made the computer run well enough to do some simple tasks.

When i checked my vista hardware score both the "graphics" and "gaming graphics" were at a 1.0. I made sure i had the latest nvidia forceware drivers installed and tried to refresh the score, but the hardware scan wouldn't sucessfully complete. I tried to downgrade the driver because i had recently updated to the newest driver, but that didn't help.

Things my computer does now:
`Proc. gets bogged down by simple things like making a drag box on the desktop. Like, if i click on the desktop and move the mouse around the screen really fast the proc. is at a 90% load.
`Windows Media Center literally takes 5 minutes to go from one screen to the next when i was setting up my 360.
`Random slow downs or proc. spikes when running no programs or simple programs.
`Video viewing is choppy and bogs down proc.
Weird one. The system details says my computer is manufactured by Dell, which is is not.

I know there is a Vista run command that scans your system's hardware and reports failures, but i can't find what the command is.

Thanks for any help

First thing: generally you need a graphics score of 3.0 or higher to run Aero, and you mention being able to use it while having a score of 1.0. Were these separate instances?

Second: if you're seeing a Dell icon in the System applet, without having a Dell PC or Dell OS disk, chances are you have a counterfeit copy of Vista. That may be related to your problem, especially if the OS disk was otherwise manipulated.

Your chain of events from format down to your symptoms all point to video, certainly a viable driver with that video card should score much higher. As your problem remained after format, the problem is likely hardware-related, although that DVD might be doing all kinds of things to your system. Go into safe mode and uninstall the video card (and anything related) in device manager, then reboot and test your performance with Vista's stock driver, it should score significantly higher; if it does not, you likely have a configuration error or hardware failure, although again you should check into the source of your OS DVD.