Sudden Vista Gaming Problem

Hello,

I have had a problem suddenly appear on my Vista Home Premium system in regards to gaming. First, I'll start with the problem and then I will let you know things I have done or changed in Vista.

I think my problem may be two-fold, one causing the other.

First, I have noticed that my hardrive appears to be accessed almost constantly. I can hear it working, little clicks pretty consistent, often only stopping for 20-30 seconds at a time here and there. I have looked at Task Manager, Process Explorer, and Diskmon to see if there is anything eating resources or may be accessing my hardrive, and for the life of me, I can't see anything out of the ordinary. When moving around through Vista or browsing the internet, there doesn't appear to be a significant slowdown of any kind.

The second problem, which may be caused by the above, is that my games are now running horribly. Choppy gameplay, low framerates, just isn't up to par.

Now the strange thing about this, is before I installed Office 2007, my games ran perfectly fine on this Vista setup. I don't know if it is because I installed Office 2007 or not, but I noticed this drop in gaming performance AFTER I installed Office 2007.

I have tweaked my services, disabled indexing in Vista, have all my latest drivers, defragged, so I don't think it is any of those. As I said, I didn't have a problem till after I installed Office 2007.

Now, I'd like to keep Office 2007 because I do use it, so I'm hoping someone has heard of a problem with it causing performance issues. Google has failed me in finding an answer.

If not, I have no clue what the problem is. This literally happened overnight.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.


Also, system specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 2.4 ghz
2 Gigs DDR2 800 Memory
eVGA 8800GTS

Yea, I had previously disabled everything, including the side bar immediately after installation.

Here is an update, as the problem may be resolved.

First, I disabled Superfetch which ended my hardrive's constant reading/writing or whatever it was doing.

Second, I scoured the net in search of any possible driver updates I missed. I came across the newest Nvidia driver on nzone.com

I also saw that they had some important Microsoft hotfixes available directly relating to issues in Company of Heroes and some other games, some of which I have been trying to play.

I also found out that VSYNC was being forced on in Company of Heroes because of a bug in the game, so I overrode it in Ntune. Bioshock has also been running flawlessly.

Needless to say, my games have been working much much better now, and Vista is running smooth as silk.

There is still a bit of slowness in CoH with settings maxed out, which I believe is due to the fact that my 2 gigs of ram is quickly expended in Vista.

The result is I've ordered another 2 gigs of DDR2 800 and I am also going to install the 64-bit version of Vista as I mistakingly installed the 32-bit version, not realising that the 64-bit version is required to fully use 4 gigs of ram, and also that apparently it is better overall.